The Gamer's Quarter

[ApM]

I know you guys didn't just play games growing up. No, I'll bet you guys drew terrible fanart, made up little "game designs" -- maybe even wrote videogame-related songs. (My magnum opus was called "Laughing In The Face Of Killer Little Goombas", in reference to a Far Side cartoon. The words have unfortunately been lost, but I still remember bits of the tune.) Perhaps you even wrote some of your own games, in something like QBasic. (I've had a couple of mine up for download for a number of years now -- apologies if the hyperbolic writing style of my younger, dumber self grates.)

Today I dug out a small booklet of sorts, titled "Jer's Game Ideas", with the hand-drawn cover featuring a cross-eyed man with his finger up his nose, and a thought bubble over his head with a burnt-out lightbulb inside. Inside are two game design treatments, printed out on a dot-matrix printer, with small B+W "title screens" done in some paint program or other. Allow me to share these well-thought-out ideas with you. (All spelling mistakes preserved.)

[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[Intentionally Wrong]

Oh, god. Why did you have to start this thread now, when I have only just rediscovered my old archives?

When I was in 4th or 5th grade, I found a book at the library on BASIC. I was thrilled with the programs the book supplied, but I was more thrilled with the thought of subverting them to tell a story--the story of one lone programmer, and his war against his wayward creations. The programmer's ultimate nemesis was an entity that referred to itself as "Suvir".

. . .

I was probably only 11 or 12. Even with that excuse, looking at the programs now is actually painful, and I find I can't run them for more than a few seconds without cringing and closing the window.

Here they are.

[ApM]

Oh, wow. Programs that act normal until they think you're their programmer, at which point they go bugfuck. Reading the source code is honestly kind of creepy. Fantastic.

I totally made a handheld game system out of paper once too. I don't remember much about it except that it had the fictional ability to link up to sixteen systems together.

[Intentionally Wrong]

Man, reading your Nostalgia page is bringing back all kinds of memories. Apparently at one point I tried to make a text adventure in QBASIC, although this was before I'd ever played a text adventure, so you can imagine how well THAT worked. One of the rooms contained (sigh) a "Rabid Barney" that you could only pass if you threw a rose at it. There were also signs scattered about written by Jema, that helpful knight character from Secret of Mana.

I'm going to have to look through my archive a bit more, I can just tell. I want to see if I can find that old text-based fighting game I tried to make.

[Shapermc]

I don't have any actual documentation ;_;

But I did program a few game for my TI-86 in High School. I would probably get expelled for it now, but one of them was an RPG style combat game where all the teachers turned into zombies and you had to kill them. I even had some really horrible faux-vector art to go along with the game (ala a FPS Dungeon Hack). Anyways I gave it to all of my friends who gave it to their friends who… yeah, well I got called into the Dean’s office a few weeks later and got enrolled into this really awesome AP computer class about a year before I was supposed to because of it (it was called Multi-Media Studies). So at least something kind of awesome came of it.

The only other thing I did like this was when I was very young (early NES days before the SMB+DuckHunt pack-in when it was just SMB) I would cut out Mario images from magazines and news paper and then build these fake TVs out of graph paper. I would cut out crappy goombas and koopas and paste them onto cardboard which I would then paste onto a popsicle stick. Me and my friends would take turns going through these fake stages I made (some based on real SMB levels from what I played in the arcades) trading off between Mario and the Enemies. It was great fun for a 5 year old.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Harveyjames]

[dessgeega]

i once mapped out an enormous imaginary cadash-a-like in a ruled organizer.

i also made a few qbasic games, despite only knowing how to print typographical characters, pause for a single second, and accept typed input with a carriage return.

i also used to take empty jukeboxes, cut windows in them, and put two pencils in them with a scroll of paper draped across them. by turning the pencils, the paper would scroll through the window and create these scrolly comic book things.
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[Harveyjames]

That's clever. I might do that one day soon. What does 'jukeboxes' mean where you come from? Presumably you're not talking about remaindered Wurlitzers.

[dessgeega]

wow, i totally meant to type "juice boxes".
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[Harveyjames]

LOL.

When I was a teen I used to chat to people on instant messenger all the time and one day in school I actually said 'lol' out loud by mistake, instead of laughing. True story

[ApM]

Harveyjames, those maps are fantastic. They reminded me of a similar thing I used to do with my friends, which was to draw single-page puzzle fortresses and then challenge each other to figure out the path we'd devised to get the key or whatever. Perhaps this explains my inordinate fondness for the single-screen puzzle platformer. I recall being especially fond of teleporters as a way of adding an element of surprise to the situation. And bombs for blowing up walls.

I did something similar with my siblings on long car trips, except those were RPG-like dungeons, made up basically on the spot one page at a time. Sort of a dumbed-down, diceless, rule-free D&D.

God! Homemade videogames on paper with the designer acting as gamemaster. What a freaking awesome idea. And I'd totally forgotten about it until this morning.

[ApM]

[extrabastardformula]

Yah, I too had a little made up D&D thing. Mine used poker chips.

I also had a game that used that and a deck of map sectiions on index cards (cut to be square so they could be oriented in any direction) to make dungeons that were dynamically generated as you explored. Any player could use their cards to put traps and stuff wherever. It didn't work that well in actual practice though.

[Harveyjames]

[Cycle]

I can't remember any of my childhood ideas
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[squidlarkin]

[ApM]

Citizens demand a download link! I've got QBASIC, I can make it go.

SELECT CASE? Man, if only I'd been so smart when I wrote my text adventure. Here is a choice snippet from Dorkgimp Weinerstink: They're Out To Suck Your Brains:

[dizzyjosh]

[Patrick Alexander]

Jeremy, you made me stop lurking! With this thread you did it.

Christ, this text is tiny. How do people write posts and not rapidly go blind? Do you use Notepad and then cut and paste? Hey, good idea.

When I was a young'un but not too young'un -- like maybe 12 or 13? -- I got my first computer, second hand, from a friend of my mother's. It was an IBM with no hard drive and 512kb of RAM, at a time when the 486DX2-66 was about your standard new computer. DOS 3.22 it used, booted from a floppy. It had a CGA monitor that technically could display 16 colours but rarely did.

I'd always wanted a computer, fairly desperately actually, and made the most of it. It ran Bubble Bobble, and my love of and appreciation for that game continues to grow and deepen. It also ran Sopwith and The Ancient Art of War. And I think Alley Cat too, though that might have come later. Resting against the wall behind the chair I'm sitting in is an unfinished Alley Cat canvas painting, painted entirely in cyan, magenta, black and white.

I wanted to learn to program, but didn't have the resources nor any clue where to get some. But I did love to tinker with my beeping, buzzing grey machine, and eventually, through trial and error, taught myself how to code batch files.

echo Pretty fucking cool!

Getting to the point: I recall attempting to create a text adventure using batch files. Just a directory full of .BAT files that displayed text. And this was DOS 3.22, so I would have been using Edlin.

It didn't get very far, of course. Neither did the hilarious joke encyclopedia I've just now remembered. Yes, an encyclopedia. Batch files. Yes.

I'm pretty sure these projects featured delusional 'software company' text files, as well. You can imagine the sort of thing. Maybe you don't need to. I strongly suspect, in both cases, that the text files were the first thing to be written.

More successful were the 'pen and paper videogames' I created, probably at age 11 or 12, for the amusement of my classmates. Reading this thread, it gives me -- dare I say it -- the fuzzies, to learn that this was a fairly universal childhood hobby for people of about the same age. I remember a stapled booklet of scrap paper that was a fighting game, inspired, probably, by Street Fighter II. Each page was a character, and I think dice-throwing was involved. No, wait! Maybe it was a grid of numbers that you closed your eyes and pointed at with a pencil. Something like that. I can't remember. I do remember the boss was an Alfred E. Neuman lookalike. I'd like to think it was all pretty creative apart from that.

Videogame-related stuff like that would pop out of my head all the time. I was totally captivated by videogames as a child, probably in part because I didn't have any. In fact I still have a slight gut resentment towards those of you who did. Computers and Nintendo were for chubby rich kids who bought their lunches from the canteen almost every day. The closest I got to playing Super Mario Kart was when Robbie Sims brought the instruction booklet to class, to show off.

Of course, even if we could have afforded a Super Nintendo, my mother probably wouldn't have allowed it, the screeching loony. I think she confiscated an Isaac Asimov library book once. I had to hide reading books from this woman. Videogames? Forget it.

In conclusion, fuck you guys and your happy, wealthy childhoods.

PS. Nice to meet you.

[Slonie]

From I don't know, 1985-ish?





Perhaps with today's next-generation hardware we can produce graphics such as these for the yet-to-be-announced Pole Position 3. At least that's what my friend at Namco said when I sent him the above picture.


Bonus one from a few years later, bu t in the same box:


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-Slonie

[fish]

not exactly videogames but for years and years as a kid i would spend all my free time building these tolkien-esque (in magnitude, not style) worlds in dozens of books id carry around with me. cultures, technologies, alphabets, one for which i had actually made a working, albeit simple constructed language. years later i wrote this very myst-like fiction that allowed to link all my different universes together as a whole.

i found some of the books recebtly and i must say, it was some pretty solid stuff for a pre-teen.

id actually spend most of my lunch hours in my corner, writing down stuff in my made up languages, which eventually got me the reputation of totally being autistic.

in my last year of high school, i had to make one big final project for art class.
i studied in this special "arts concentration" program where for all the 5 years of high school, i had as many art classes as french and math combined! and for the lastr year, all students worked ALL YEAR on one project that had to incorporate at least 3 disciplines. that project for me was my biggest and best world yet, incorporating the best parts of all those that came before it. at the end of the year, an exhibition was held, and everybody incited their friends and families and such. you'd have big sculpture there, a painting there. and then my thing which was bsicly just a table, covered with books and pieces of fake parchemin and scrools. and a wall full of diagrams and chartsand architectural plans and alphabets. it was awesome.
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you cant spell selfish without fish

[ApM]

[Patrick Alexander]

Slonie: Rock.

I know it's been done, but there need to be more and better games that look like children's drawings.

Jumblebee: Hallo! Thanks!

[kirkjerk]

Oh, man, brilliant thread.

I did so much of this.

A lot of fake game designing. One thing I loved was Compute! Gazette's sprite and character set editors. Probably my most elaborate game was something called "Beamers" (kind of an injoke with a friend), with a ton of little enemies running around the screen, except I think you need to herd them. Crossroads was kind of close to what I was dreaming of... probably a bit better in fact, but I had the idea of the character sets.

I spend a lot of time making elaborate title and "acknowledgments" screens for games that I would never write.

I did do some stuff in Logo and BASIC... I was fascinated with "artificial life", so I made the 4 turtles of Atari Logo (that already looked liked turtles, actually) roam around a little aquarium. And then in C=64 BASIC I made these one one character cell organism that would wander around the screen randomly, or you could press a button and drop a particle of food that they would seek out... actually it was then that I figured out the trick of giving things a x and y speed and adding that every click to the position of the character, and then only modify the speed, not the position itself. (I also learned that a simple tracking critter will orbit food in a figure 8 loop rather than find it directly.)

I think it's a bummer that no computer boots into BASIC or something similar these days. There are some neat programming environments around, and the web provides a whole host of different creativity and publishing options, but I think anyone born after 1984 or 5 or so is really going to miss out of how to get a computer to do mildly interesting things.

Finally, somewhat related, in seventh grade or so I made this book:

You can see the whole thing here, including a map of "The Place Where It All Is" which owed more than a passing nod to Loony Tunes "It can happen here" Wackyland. But the more blatant rip off was video game related: I stole the idea of a "pudding based life form" from an Antic Atari magazine type in game Rebound, Flip Ogart vs. the RotogartEatos. (ok, Ogarts aren't technically pudding-based, but the idea is there.)
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[kirkjerk]

Also, I remember paper-designing a gameboy competitor, MegaGame or some such, with a lot of Mega-* named games, which means I had MegaMan years before Capcom.
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[ApM]

BEGIN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE NERD RANT

[kirkjerk]

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE NERDNESS CONTINUES...

[ApM]

[dessgeega]

i, for two, would love to read such an article!
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[sediment]

Likewise, regarding the article.

I've got a dresser drawer back at my mom's house that's filled to the brim with old drawings and shit of mine from about ... fourteen accumulated years of my childhood and early teens. There's a lot of really stupid stuff in there, but next time I have a chance I'm going to rummage through it and find some gems.

One thing I can remember offhand: I once took a checkers set and sculpted little clay figurines on top of about eight pieces for each side, each of them wildly different in appearance. I then made up these horrendously convoluted and intricate rules for playing the game, inspired largely by the character interactions from Battle Chess, and desperately tried to convince friends and my sister to play it with me (to see how well it worked).
(Note I did this because I didn't really "get" chess strategy - I figure hey, I move all my guys this way and kill everyone, right? So my dad always beat me. sadface.)

After drafting scores of new villains and weapons and stages for Mega Man to be thrown against, I eventually tired of that and did a couple of new Street Fighter characters and, finally, began plotting original content. One of my first is a game that's sort of DOOM in opposite - you're a zombie, and you're out to save your zombie people from the legions of humans oppressing you. You've got a rocket shotgun (don't ask) and can throw grenades. I'd planned it as a top-down isometric sort of deal, with intricate grenade physics (bouncing!) and if you held a button and moved you'd move slowly, which means sneaky, which means you could catch humans standing at water coolers (in a ... dungeon) and do completely normal damage at them, but they'd be surprised.

Before age seven or eight I did fake movies... really early stuff is really embarassing, like when I was probably three or four my mom got me a kiddie cassette player/recorder with a big red plastic microphone. There's a He-Man tape out there somewhere that I figured out how to write to and has a really awkward conversation between a small boy and whoever the hell was voicing the pantsless hero back then. I also drew (but didn't write, because when I was younger I never really liked to write or really speak at all) out detailed scenes from a sequel to Commando wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger's character, filled with remorse for the wholesale slaughter he engaged in to rescue his family (or whomever, haven't seen the movie in ages) decides to... yep, kill more people. Sadly. I may have invented the "emo badass" archetype seen so often in modern media.
(Note, this elaborate plan is from an age where I drew mostly in squares - so Arnold's head is a giant pink rectangle. I'll provide an example when I have access to The Drawer.)

I stopped doing stuff like this because none of my friends really seemed interested until my chums and I in an AP Comp Sci class in high school rewrote asteroids as sort of an off-record group competition. My variant was pretty simple: I upped the fire rate, shortened fire distance, making the weapon more a laser whip than a gun, and so you'd just swing the ship around and lash the meteors away. My friend Jimmy experimented with object size and colour, eventually resulting in what he called AIDS, wherein you, a syringe, shoot antibody at one of dozens of tiny meteors (smaller than your ship) - but if you impact one, it'll just divide into like thirty, and impact other meteors who also divide exponentially, leading to the ultimate death of all humanity. You could not beat AIDS.
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[Harveyjames]

What's Jimmy doing now?

[daphaknee]

i have some recordings of me making up songs to game music from when i was little i should find those

ducktales and mario2 and ninja gaiden with LYRICS

[Harveyjames]

OH WOW I wanna hear those.

Me and my friend used to sing along to SMB1's overworld theme, 'I believe in christmas time, do-oo-oo you beieve i-in christmas?' Then the star theme would be 'Santa Claus is bakin' busicuits, what has Santa baked for you, 'Santa Claus is bakin' bisicuits, what has Santa baked for you'. We did this even in the middle of May!

[kirkjerk]

I was looking for the high school note that I scanned my alien bill avatar from, so I could rescan it in a square-cropped-friendly way. And I found this:

Yeesh, that's probably high school era.
I'm not sure where it dates relative to me using Alien Bill as a signature character...

Anyway, I think the idea is that it's a bit of an Archon spin off. (With a bit of influence of this one Compute's Gazette ripoff of it, Front Line.. basically Archon, but with soldiers, and they fought for control of hills... I found out you could activate the one on one combat mode w/ a certain "POKE" command, and tried to wrap a better game in BASIC around it, but couldn't come up with a fast enough screen drawing routine in BASIC.)

So, ALIENZ, with the cool Z.... probably you started with a simple melee sword, and by capturing factories could get soliders with guns, bombs, and remote control planes (the latter is the strongest Archon 2 influence)

Maybe I should try to make this as a Glorious Trainwreck...
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[Swimmy]

You totally should. How often do people make their odd childhood ideas into real games?

(Don't answer that.)
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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[Harveyjames]

You should make my childhood game design, 'Killer'. You are a robot programmed to explore an underground cavern. The rivers can kill you so what you have to do is press jump twice.

[Lackey]

Go for your Enemies Rocket

I will!
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[kirkjerk]

[Harveyjames]

I thought it said 6000 weapons!

[kirkjerk]

[Lackey]

Get the 6000 weapons is a good goal as long as you get them all at once.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Faithless]

This is a very charming thread. I don't have anything that I can add. But I'm really happy to read what everyone else is writing.
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www.call-to-adventure.com
Don't Refuse.

[Slonie]

Glad this thread came back...I wonder if I have any more from the Pole Position Era.

One drawing I clearly remember doing at my friend's dining room table was the last boss of Contra...But the heart was kind of drawn from hazy memory and was more the shape of a mountain yam than any actual organ in a human (or alien) body. I'll never find that drawing though, unfortunately.
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-Slonie

[FortNinety]

The only way I could contribute to this thread is if I had voice recorded the conversation I had when I called Nintendo to suggest to them that they re-release Mario Bros and Wrecking Crew as the Mario Collection, back when Wrecking Crew was out of print and I was desperate for my own copy, since they had just done so with Donkey King 1 and 2. And man, the person on the other end was so awfully nice. I was like 8 at the time btw, and thank God no tape exists.

[kirkjerk]

[Harveyjames]

This thread has got 'spazzamatazz'. I wonder if it's possible to overuse that phrase. I don't think it is: 'spazzamatazz'.

[daphaknee]

that used to be my nickname in middle school