It started with playing King's Quest 1 for me: just the idea of creating a world that you could walk around in and interact with... I immediately started making my own games on paper with drawings and paper cut-outs, acting out the game by moving characters around on hand-drawn backgrounds. Via Gamebuilder and Superlogo, and later modding levels and tilesets for Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and 3D animation with trueSpace, I kept making things and I eventually ended up getting into the games industry as an animator, but always kept the urge to create my own games as well. Realized a couple years ago Game Maker could pretty much do everything I wanted for 2D games, and have been using that ever since.
These days I'm inspired by everything... art, museums, travel, history, mythology, books, cinema, and of course other games.