In the town of Angie, Louisiana, among a population of 1,500, was Cj Peters. Thanks to his mom, he learned early on that computers were his thing. That’s because his mom would always steer him away from fad video game consoles, and more toward machines with keyboards.
“Instead of an Atari, she got us a Magnavox Odyssey 2,” Cj says, while recommending you Google it if it doesn't ring a bell. Otherwise, you’ll just have to take his word for it.
It looked like an Atari (a game console released way back in 1977), but it came with a keyboard and various kinds of educational and leisure games: typing, math, memory, and arcade-style games just to name a few. “That’s when I really got into video games,” he says. “I’ve been playing… almost since birth.”
So it makes sense that throughout high school, Cj would seek out every available room with a computer in it: typing class, word processing, whatever would let him get access to those kid-tested, mother-approved keyboards.
In fact, instead of getting the typical class ring like most other high school students —his mother had given him a choice: Cj could either choose a class ring or a computer. And naturally, Cj chose a computer.
His first PC at home had been an aging IBM PS/2 (again, something you might have to Google). He still laughs when he remembers the RadioShack guy promising that, “this thing has 438 megabytes of memory. You’ll never run out of space.”
A year plus later, Cj had already maxed it out. “That guy was just trying to sell a computer…”
Then came those college years, which pulled him even deeper down the rabbit holes of tech and media.
He dug into an “HTML Bible” while visiting his sister during an internship in Southern California, teaching himself to build web pages. He launched a music video show using linear tape editing (basically working two VCRs to cut the footage), eventually earning a coveted slot hosting a radio show on campus, reaching listeners from Baton Rouge all the way to New Orleans.
The show also became a hub where rising artists would stop by, one of whom, David Banner, later became a friend and client, asking Cj to help build a few early websites. “We were doing e-commerce before there was e-commerce,” Cj says.
The party came to a stop when the dot-com bubble burst, when Cj’s stint at IBM devolved into nothing more than late night tech support. That’s when he turned his attention to another love: design.
He decided to cut his design teeth at an art school (“print-perfect pieces” were the goal), and started merging his array of passions together: music, gaming, design, community.
And out of that alchemy came forth Konsole Kingz.
Today, Konsole Kingz is the publisher and Black Spades is the game, carrying a mission Cj repeats often: “to help preserve and extend the history of spades within African American culture… and to become the only digital entity to house the most comprehensive list of African-American spades rules.”
