Posted by wordglyph 9 hours ago
I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzIc_c1PvE
I have no idea how I received that, but it was so cool!
Anyway, YC's Heart Aerospace's intended commercial airframe design now does use a turboprop as a backup (for range extension beyond the capabilities of their battery electric engine), so six year old you was clearly onto something :)
https://i.imgur.com/1eHcead.jpeg
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
https://i.imgur.com/Y2wGcRt.jpeg
I did grow up to become a professional game developer though!
Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.
It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.
Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.
I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.
It's such a terrible response for someone that was not in fact suggesting a new feature for the franchise.
And even if it had been, rejecting the entire letter for one sentence is still bad.
It's polite. Being polite is pretty much expected here.
I guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.
I got a rejection letter once from a company I submitted my resume to (online) and I still remember that and in a positive light even though it was a rejection.
Now they just ghost you even if you went through 5 rounds of interviews and spend a bunch of your time.
They sent me a letter thanking me and said that they don't develop games in a nice way.
I immediately filed that letter with the orange Sony letterhead and still have it til this day.
Good times.
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
it's a great marketing platform, if anything. Strong brand loyalty going forward and costs you not much to do well, not to mention you can brighten a day or few for thousands of kids in all sorts of life situations.
I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
Gen X kids were starving for any adult not their parents to acknowledge their existence. Which made us targets for predators. But now we’ve overcorrected and acknowledgement is routine. That dopamine hit is practically free.
(I know that submariners literally have water obstacle courses where they have to learn to, for instance, do some repairs while a compartment is flooding, but I’ve no idea what the Navy does as a whole).
Feel like that opened something in me..
I recall their response being very human, warm and encouraging, but it also included all of our original sketches, with a very direct (but kid-understandable) statement that they were obligated to return the originals to make it very clear that they were not kept and thus could not possibly be understood to be "inspiration" for anything that might be in a future game.
If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.
But I assume the people who get the mail are trained to see if the envelope contains ideas to stop reading and return the mail with the canned lawyer response.
They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincidence, so they don't want to take any chance.
I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere.
Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a different time.
Edit: no dice!
I'm curious about this - I thought it was a very expensive process to patent something.
