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By TONI WHITE
Staff Writer 

The NCSAC Nerds and Geeks club was left in the dark about who would be taking over for this year after last year’s president, vice-president and treasurer for the NCSAC Nerds and Geeks club graduated.

Fortunately, Nenad Milenkovic, a second-year Game Development student and graduate of Niagara College’s Computer Engineering program, stepped up to the plate.

Milenkovic couldn’t bear to see the Nerds and Geeks go down the drain and felt it was his duty to step up and continue to see the club grow.

He spoke with NCSAC about the future of the club during the second week of semester, and they informed him that paperwork on the new staff for the group would need to be handed in that Friday, but that no one had stepped up to fill any of the positions.

As a result, he took it upon himself to fill the position and a friend of his, Darryl Sourwine, volunteered to fill the vice-president position. One of Milenkovic’s classmates, Briena Tofflemire, also volunteered to be this year’s secretary-treasurer.

“I talked to a bunch of people and I asked if they could see me being president and they all said yes,” Milenkovic said.

He explained that he did not take the position for “power or fame,” but simply because it was at risk of being disassembled. He asked around previously if other Nerds and Geeks members would run the club.

“I’m not really angry or upset that I had to be president either, because I like doing game night. I like the idea of anime night, so my reason for running the club is so that I can keep those events alive. And as an added bonus I had a bunch of professors telling me: ‘Oh, that’s a good thing to put on your resume,’” he said.

Darryl Sourwine spoke very highly of Milenkovic. He explained that the two met through the club and have been friends for two years as a result and work very well together.

“We couldn’t have ended up with a better president at this point in time. Nenad’s been in this club for a while now and was the only person I could think of that was capable of doing it,” Sourwine said.

Nenad has worked very diligently to ensure that anime and game nights run smoothly, and consistently goes above and beyond to allow the club members to have an enjoyable experience playing video games.

In fact, he is often taking a large majority of the work the club needs to continue running, such as organizing meetings and planning events.

“I know I should get other people to work too but at the same time, I’m used to taking a lot of workload myself, especially at Rainforest Cafe where my job is and dealing with my school assignments as well. So it’s really not a new thing to me,” he said.

Milenkovic organized for a Halloween-themed escape room that happened the Friday before reading week and he is also running a tournament on Dec. 7 when the new Super Smash Bros ultimate comes out for the Nintendo Switch.

As for his personal life, Milenkovic plans to simply pass all of his classes this year and continue working at his job at the Rainforest Cafe, and continue collecting new video games. He also likes to fiddle around with technology, for example: building computers, testing out graphics cards, RAM, and playing around with old operating systems.

He is working on getting MS DOS, the very first windows operating system to exist before Windows even came out, to run on his computer so he can play very old PC games that you would see on a floppy disk because he wants to start collecting floppy disk games.

He started collecting video games five years ago, and in 2015 his brother-in-law gave him a Super Nintendo, which helped encourage his hobby. He currently has a collection of over 1,800 games.

Milenkovic went into the Game Development program because he likes to play different types of games and feels like the program will help him figure out how to make a story and develop characters.

“It gives me a better understanding of how video games are made and how to appreciate them more,” he said.

Milenkovic also explained that he chose to become the president because when he first joined the club he talked to the current staff regularly and discussed what he could do to help contribute to the club.

“When I realized they didn’t have any TVs or an idea on how to bring video games over, I just went over to the engineers who had an old TV they were trying to get rid of.

“I asked if I could have it. They were like ‘yeah’, so I picked it up with my bare hands, walked all the way to the commons table where the Nerds and Geeks table used to be and I just put it down on the desk and said: ‘Congrats you guys have a TV for video games now,’” he said.

Milenkovic has contributed a lot to the club so far and is keen on continuing to help the Nerds and Geeks grow despite how busy his life outside of it can be.

“I figure, people like playing video games and they probably want to have a good time.”