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[Alevice]

I actually liked "designing" games on paper when I was a kid, but most of them were sequels of games I liked. Like a super mario world involving a bobomb boss, and a super duper king k. rool that turned into super muscular, rather than being a fatso.

I did make a lot of comics inspired about video games characters, mostly about Clay Fighters and Earthworm Jim, up to like 10th garde By that age, most of the plots and artwork where heavily inspired by Dragon Ball and DBZ, including super clayjins! Bad Mr. Frosty and The Blob were like a gay dynamic duo, now that I remember. At least the Blob was such a crybaby (much unlike its official incarnation). Octohead was more often than not the Big Bad.

I remember when I was like 7 years old I did a mini comic about the Clay Fighter blob, being formerly a human who was consumed by a green substance until he became the aforementioned character, way before the spiderman cartoon showed up the origin of spidey's symbiote (remarkably similar to my comic!). Damn plagiarism!

My brother and I used to do draw games on paper all the time. We started whenever our compulsive liar friend told us that sega would make your game if you designed all the levels on paper and mailed it into them. He also told us that a friend of his created bomberman that way.

Did anyone not grow up knowing that one kid who was a compulsive liar about video games? It's like some kind of archetype that transcends geography and culture.

Hey I was one, except it was more about movies than games. When a kid, never having seen the alien movies, but being a big fan of the toy line (they were awesome, I think I still have a few of them stashed somewhere), I made up the whole goddamn plot of Aliens (the sequel, if you must know) and I involved almost every single species concoted in the toy line, including the super badass scorpion alien and the snake alien. Fortunately, it seems I was good at making stories (at least to my target audience), for some of them found them cooler than the actual movies were, once we all watched them for the first time.

Oh, and I remember when I said the Exorcist, not knowing what exorcism actually meant, was about a serial killer (the titular exorcist... hey, it sounded like a title you'd be given for doing horrible shit when you were a kid), and gave you nightmares for months via subliminal messages.

But I did know a group compulsive videogame liars, particularly claiming shit about the existance of many bootleg games, like Megaman Z, which they claimed was a pirated Megaman X, but it was super awesome and Megaman had a lot of new moves.

Interestingly enough, I actually had the chance to meet a compulsive video game liar right at the first year of college, in a computer science related career. The guy told us that he could cheat LoZ: OoT to get the triforce and turn the game into spanish, and that he was super awesome and beat the last unbeatable epona race. Most of us were already pseudo romhackers and game modder, so most of us knew the boundaries of many games, and this guy spouting us shit at the age of 20 years was downright laughable. He was actually very stupid overall.

Oh, and does anyone remember those myths about Killer Instinct's B. Orchid's alternate finishing move?

[agj]

Me, I didn't make mock videogames, but I did make lots of board games in paper, but they were all pretty much the same and relied too heavily on dice. Many were inspired by videogames, though, but not too heavily. It's still my fantasy to make an awesome board game, though.

6 - in Garlic Village Garlic head Joins You

Hm, well, this sounds oddly familiar...

One thing I clearly remember was the problem of making a 3D game on a 2D piece of paper. (...) But I guess by drawing my level from multiple angles, I was unknowingly taking the first step toward Cubism :D

Dude, this is great. This is the kind of thing that kids do which they later learn is 'wrong'. Fuck education, seriously.

The other thing I used to do was test ideas for games by telling my friends about them as if they were real. If my friends said the game sounded cool, I knew it was a good idea.

Awesome.

Oh, and does anyone remember those myths about Killer Instinct's B. Orchid's alternate finishing move?

Hmm, do you mean this one?

[William Broom]

I thought that one was real. They had it on ScrewAttack one time. I think with some characters their eyes actually pop out of their skull before they die  :D

Anyway, I dug up a ton of my old game drawings and I'm gonna scan them in now.

[William Broom]

This was going to be something like this weird game I had a demo for. I can't remember what it was called but it might have included the words 'Might and Magic' and it was an isometric tactical-RPG where you summoned monsters, but it was divided into missions like a strategy game. Anyway, note the Gorgon on the battlements and the adorable bandits hiding in the tree.

This was some kind of Rube Goldberg machine involving creatures. There was no actual way to 'play' these, they just sort of activated. Try to work out what happens! Damned if I can remember. I still laugh at the phrase 'Old People Anonymous' though.

I think this was going to be a Diablo-esque dungeon crawler, before I'd ever heard of Diablo. Exactly the kind of game I would hate to play now.

There was one other that wasn't much to look at so I didn't bother to scan it, but it had a really cool little thing in it. The game was a dungeon-crawling puzzle-solving thing, a bit like Zork, I think, but when you reached the end of the first level, you found this door with a 3-fingered handprint on it which you couldn't open. So you went home with your treasure and lived happily ever after. But then thousands of years later, this three-fingered alien comes to the dungeon and you play as him. And he is like, the chosen one who can get to the next level.

[deadeye]

Did anyone not grow up knowing that one kid who was a compulsive liar about video games? It's like some kind of archetype that transcends geography and culture.

A friend of mine once told me that if you pop the protective cover off of the bottom of your NES there's a slot there (which is true) that plays Sega Master System games (which is not true).  He said that the NES was originally designed to play both by flipping the console over to plug in different carts, but Sega sued Nintendo over it.  Instead of redesigning the hardware, which "had already been built and it would cost too much," they just redesigned the case to cover the slot.

It sounded so plausible at the time that I spent my entire adolescence and a good portion of my adulthood believing it, and only discovered the truth a few years ago.

[Türbo Bröther]

I have never wanted to find my plans for a Gain Ground hex-based strategy game I did in the seventh grade more than right now.

[sergiocornaga]

Ahh, chutup, those are awesome. There are so many little details that I love, like "I would have suicide," the doors in your third picture, and the entire premise of that fourth one you describe: I think I would have just cut off a finger or two to go to level 2. 

I believe the game you can't remember was one of these.

[Gainsworthy]

WHERE ARE YOUR SPIKES? Me and my brother's levels had spikes freaking everywhere. Because spikes were cool, and difficult. One, in particular, had a spiked protagonist, powerups, and... well, the lot. I'll try and dig it up.

My biggest project was a Jazz Jackrabbit Respectful Homage. Six Year Old Me dedicated an entire book to work on that. If we have a...  Oh my Goodness. A Games You Designed as a Kid Compo. WE MUST DO THIS. Anyways, it'd be fun to make one day. Hells alotta spikes.

Video Game Liars! They're a world wide thing? Blow me down. Ah, this one guy I beleived for a good while, but after never finding the games he told me about, I cottoned on. He was rather perplexed when I started "playing" the games he made up, and giving nice, solid descriptions.  :D Sadly, this had the effect of stopping his lies rather rapidly. Shame I haven't met any 20 year old video-game liars. Didn't think they lasted that long.

Also, Chutup? Those look a lot like my brother's drawings from years back - lines, colours, etc. Other than thematically, of course - not enough of the aforementioned spikes. Rather strange.

[Puzzle]

After rummaging through my filing cabinet for half an hour or so, I come across these...
They're not very good quality - my scanner packed in a couple of months ago and so I'm using my digital camera. It's supposedly 5mp, but the photos look more like they've been taken with a phone or something.

Toad in the Hole! - box art for a competiton in Nintendo Official Magazine. It was never printed.

Yizno character classes - a table of character classes for a game similar to Soldat which I designed. Yes, that's an AK-79.
Yizno capture the flag scene - capture the oppositions flag and return it to your base. Try not to get impaled on any bloody spikes, mind.
Yizno promotional poster - every man for himself! Features a variety of weapons including grenades, LAWs and assault rifles.



Back in the day when I thought games were composed of thousands of images which showed every single combination of events, I created about 100 different Pokemon screenshots which showed the starting town. When I find them, I'll post them! 

[Facero]

I drew an odd looking fairy that resembled piccolo from the DBZ series. Basically looks like what Seiklus looks like except your character had wings and could flap a certain number of times, much like Enjoying The View.

[William Broom]

"I would have suicide,"

Hah, actually the last bit of the word got cut off by the scanner and I didn't realise. The correct line is "I would have suicided".

I love that Yizno character classes sheet. What exactly did the 'Tomatoes' class do?

[Puzzle]

I love that Yizno character classes sheet. What exactly did the 'Tomatoes' class do?

It basically allows you to nail your opponents with juicy, ripe tomatoes! :D

[isaac]

Oh man, all these kid games are awesome. I'm going to have to do some digging to see if I haven't thrown out any of mine.

I designed a crap-ton of pen and paper rpgs as a kid... and could never convince any of my friends to play them for longer than a single session.

[sergiocornaga]

The correct line is "I would have suicided".

Even better! Debatably.

[isaac]

Back in the day when I thought games were composed of thousands of images which showed every single combination of events, I created about 100 different Pokemon screenshots which showed the starting town. When I find them, I'll post them! 

Oh good. I'm not the only kid who thought that Goldeneye was made by making millions and millions of pictures of everything that could ever happen.

[William Broom]

Haha, that reminds me of a lame RPG I played with my friend in primary school. He was the hero, and I was the dungeon master. Basically I told him a story and he said what he wanted to do. There was no dice, and no combat system, so any battle consisted of my friend saying something like "I jump on the demon's back, and grab it by its teeth, and snap its neck in half!" and I would be like "Can't argue with that."

But the story quickly devolved into nonsense because I didn't plan ahead at all. I think the absolute nadir of my career as a writer was when I explained to my friend that he had found an ancient text in which was written: "If your name is Jake, come to Seahaven." I mean, ok, they knew his name because he's the chosen one and stuff. But what kind of security measure is "if your name is Jake"? Did they expect the evil demons to read it and go "Oh well, my name's not Jake. Never mind." ?

Needless to say, that particular venture into the world of roleplaying ended fairly quickly.

I also have vague memories of what is probably my first game plan ever. This was probably when I was only 5 or 6 because it was when our computer ran on Windows 95. My plan was to make a game where you were a little black ball who ran from big black balls, since I figured my first game should be really simple and easy to make. However I had some weird but specific requirements for it: I wanted to have the background music be the theme song from the Discworld cartoon show, and I wanted a photograph of Chewbacca on the title screen. Why, I have no idea.

[Gnarf]

I wanted to have the background music be the theme song from the Discworld cartoon show, and I wanted a photograph of Chewbacca on the title screen. Why, I have no idea.

I'm not sure about the theme song, but the chewbacca was obviously in case someone sued you over the use of that music.

[siiseli]

I once made a ripoff of salamander(msx game). As a board-game. I controlled the ship with my finger and forced my relatives to scroll the backround for me :D

[agj]

Siiseli, that's hilarious. Reminded me of this ridiculous little game that came with the happy meal, I think, in which you control a ship using a little lever, and have to avoid some asteroids, which you also scroll yourself by rotating a knob on its side.

I thought that [Orchid finishind move] was real.

That's because it is!

[necromian]

Damn, I would love to see a copy of that point and click book :D

And speaking of video game lies, back in the days of Pokemon gold and silver, my friend and i were looking for faqs, and we stumbled upon a full 50 page walkthrough for a non-existent "orange island" level. Those were some good times.