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These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games. Unless you were one of those weird kids that called Nintendo Power helpline of course!
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!
When I was thirteen I sent an email to Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds.com) telling him I wanted to make my own website with Coldfusion (which I had learned about through a pirated copy of DreamWeaver) and MySQL, and asked if would help me make it. [1]
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
My job entails me writing mostly Coldfusion all day long. I write new code in Coldfusion script. Its syntax heavily inspired by javascript, right down to the optional terminating semicolon. I still have to support a fair bit of code written in Coldfusion tag syntax. That I dislike especially given the code base was written by amateur developers and just makes me feel like bad php from 2003.
Oh I am very familiar with Coldfusion. My first job after dropping out of college [1] was doing Flash and Coldfusion work for a Martial Arts management company.
I have very mixed feeling on the language as a whole, both the tag and script language, though they’re mostly negative nowadays. I joined the CFML Slack a few months ago, which I was surprised to find, and the people on there were very nice and I respected their passion for the platform, but I personally still find the language pretty irritating, even with the scripty version.
Granted, I am very removed from web stuff now, and mostly work in data-land.
[1] I have a degree now, but that came considerably later.
Six year old me sent an idea to McDonnell Douglas for an airplane with turboprops to back up the jets in case of engine fire. There was also a fire suppression system. They sent me some nice brochures about the DC-8, -9, and -10, but looking back on it they could have mentioned that the jets are already redundant and will usually stop burning when the fuel is cut.
I hope they at least acknowledge that it was quite impressive for a six year old to understand the distinction between different types of engine and consider engine fires.
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 :)
Teenage me sent a letter to a US airline maintenance department asking why they don't put a one-directional fin on the landing gear tires to cause them to rotate in the air, so they wouldn't create as much smoke when they contact the runway. I don't remember what the reason was, but they wrote me back so I appreciated it.
Pinwheels on landing gear would be pimp.
> usually
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
Isn't that what happens when they post their projects on HN?
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Volunteer to judge the science fair?
In 1997 I typed up a letter to Maxis in Microsoft Creative Writer about how much I liked their games and wanted to move to America and work at Maxis when I grew up:
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!
Since there doesn't seem to be any record in the Internet by the way, this is what printed cities looked like in SimCity 1 (these are my own scans of some printouts from 1996):
> "it may be a little hard to understand"
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.
I always thought the catch-22 was funny where they say they saw that I was suggesting an idea ¾ of the way through the letter, so they chose to return the letter without reading it.
> catch-22
That's not really a catch-22. It's just a contradiction.
What I mean is, they have to read the letters to check whether they're ones they can't read.
Fair enough. I think I cracked the case though: they probably have someone who isn't "them" read the letters though, a third party like another law firm or some contractor that offers that service specifically.
Someone has not read a book even if they read the opening paragraph, so the solution is likely far simpler.
Nope. The key sentence was at the end of the letter. At least we know one person who didn't read it. ;)
I suppose the legal department wants the wording of that paragraph to be very specific. It’s not only there for the kid, it’s for the court as well.
Love that they took the time to draft a kind letter and let you down easy. Maxis cared.
I can't tell if you're joking or not about the form letter there.
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.
Creative Writer is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. What's the state of kids software nowadays?
Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.
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.
>>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.
Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.
The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.
This is a timely post. Just last night my 8 y/o asked if she could create a presentation on my laptop like they do at school. I have no idea what software they use at the elementary school.
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.
Check out Canva. It might even be what they're using at school already. It doesn't have the simplicity and fun of the old stuff, but it's intuitive to use even for kids. A lot of features where they're broken convention in ways that actually make more sense than the standard, for example resizing images keeps the aspect ratio by default instead of stretching.
I made a paint app for toddlers recently, exactly because I couldn't find anything fun & useable & educational:
Can't see the images as imgur has geoblocked the UK.
The 2nd image:
A lot of companies and organizations actually reply to letters/emails of any kind. Often very appropriately and not just with some boilerplate text.
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.
you can get a lifetime fan just by replying to a letter - like you see here. That's a very effective marketing.
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.
> you can get a lifetime fan just by replying to a letter
Absolutely. But it doesn't increase next quarter's revenue. Which seems to be the main metric nowadays.
Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.
> I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail:
Wait, the villains have Sega and Sony logos. How were they able to do that legally?
At first, I was thinking you received a cease and desist :D
That VHS was one of my favorites. Me and my sisters would watch it over and over. Love how camp it was.
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
There were even books that listed the companies, their addresses, and the free things they’d send you.
We did Flat Stanley in second grade[1, circa ~2000], including mailing him to someone to send him on an adventure. I sent my Stanley off to Volkswagen and he came back bearing little toy pull-back VW Beetles and smelled like a new car…
We went down a different path. We used to write to chocolate companies and they would send us free stickers etc. They advertised the product of course but it was fun.
Man that tape. I wish I still had mine!
Ah yes, I did similar, I pitched a game idea I had called "shadowstorm", drew out a sketch of the protagonist and sent it to Sony PlayStation address.
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.
> weird VHS tape
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
I can see where a lot of youtube content creators (WizardsWithGuns comes to mind...) derive their cartoonish humour from
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
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.
Exactly ... Used to play buggy games and used to absolutely love them, nowadays it seems like everything has to be beyond perfect.
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"Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips."
Just a reminder: we've supposedly been in/near late/end stage capitalism for over a hundred and fifty years now. Marx was proposing this back at the end of the nineteenth century.
I think starting in the 30s and esp after WW2/cold war era helped reset it somewhat. It started to pick back up in the 80s and into overdrive with the internet
It was supposed to collapse in the 1930s. It's a bit like the street preacher, if you say "the end is nigh" often enough, one day you'll be right.
[dead]
I don't think the magic left with the Internet, but with adulthood, some combination of your own and among the C's at the company.
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
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.
Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.
Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.
Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.
Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.
Kids come and go, whereas the teachers stay there. I feel a lot of school teachers are jealous of the kids and hence all the bullying by them.
Are you familiar with the kids story book Iggy Peck Architect by Andrea Beaty? Same story, with a happy ending though.
One of the things that got me in to "coding" when I was 9 years old was building tic tac toe in Excel, locking the window size to 3x3 cells and then implementing clicks as links to the next board state, with the "computer" having already played the next move. The whole sheet had every possible board state written out by hand.
This sounds like this old xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/832/
I wrote to Sainsburys (large UK grocery store chain) in 1993, suggesting an idea for a "self checkout", where you would scan items yourself as you put them into your shipping cart. My anti-theft solution was that they'd weigh your cart as you left, to make sure you'd scanned everything!
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.
So you're to blame!
*thank
The problem with that is the benefit of inspiring children does little to nothing for the business, while the risk of frivolous but expensive legal actions because you decide you should get millions for inventing the self service checkout is not insignificant.
I'd suspect many places would still respond positively though, especially in the more creative worlds. Almost every creative was that kid once.
You'd have better luck mailing a letter, but to be honest the kind of "sending a letter and getting a reply from the CEO or some sort of higher up" is long gone unfortunately. There is a few exceptions, but all of them are for very old private companies. You will never get a reply from Pepsi as a kid with a new flavour idea. Or Disney about a new ride for that matter.
Ask a kid (preferably one of your own or a niece or nephew, etc.) to write to your local football team and see what happens. Some are good about it, some aren't. It helps if you send a letter to the correct department instead of sending an email to a generic contact address.
There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.
When I was young I wrote to the Formula 1 team McLaren to ask if they could hire me for a student job. I didn't expect to get a reply, but I got one. The answer was negative, but I was happy. I never reflected about it until now, but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer? Not sure that was the turning point, but this is indeed my approach! :-)
When I was probably 10 or so, one of the largest computer magazines in the country had a job for a 'junior writer'. My 10yo brain did not realize that junior meant 'just finished the relevant education' and though 'hey, I'm a junior'. So I just called them up and the guy on the other side of the line was clearly confused what to say to me not to disappoint me too much and mumbled something like "the person responsible for hiring is not around". In hindsight, it's pretty ballsy for a kid to just call, if I had to do it ten/fifteen years later I'd have been pretty nervous.
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
>The answer was negative, but I was happy.
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.
5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
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.
You're severely mistaken if you think that's how businesses operate. Companies penny pinch on staff even for recruiting, they're not gonna increase headcount just to answer mail form kids just because you think it makes good marketing.
not sure where you work, but you might consider changing the company you work with.
You can spin up any idea and claim it increases brand loyalty, but you have to have actual evidence that that either happens or actually matters in some way, and in this case it probably doesn't and isn't worth the expense once the scale exceeds >1 employee spending more than a few minutes a day. If you've got the data to prove otherwise so that you can actually make someone money, go ahead and sell people on the idea.
I don't have to - it's called image branding and is a well-known and established marketing discipline. Not direct ROI like hard sell techniques, but it lands you with higher margins, lower customer acqusition costs, longer customer lifetime value, etc. Apple was a master at that, Nike, and in this particular example LEGO regularly responds to children mail, Nintendo built a whole business channel around it with Nintendo Power and I'm sure I could pull out many more examples. Not everything is a hard sell technique.
So according to you, we should all quit our jobs and go work for Lego, Nike, Apple and Nintendo because they have good PR with kids, while you ignore the fact that most of them use sweatshop labor in China, fuck the environment and sue honest people for bullshit IP reasons?
If the problem of society could be summed up in one bite, this would be it.
Maybe you'd be less angry if you worked for a better company, who knows. Try it.
Because you actually believe the world is full of benevolent companies who work for the public good?
Or maybe people have seen what companies are doing behind the scenes that goes against their PR, making it worthless and hypocritic. Remember "don't be evil"?
You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.
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 think this is one of the ways in which the internet is dangerous for children.
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.
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
Little did you know that your ideas were incorporated into Navy training. The Navy is wet work and you need practice working in such conditions. They unfortunately left out your concessions stands and the water slide. Sorry.
(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).
Damage Control theme park?
sounds awesome tbh. If you build it, I will come.
That's amazing!
When I was 10 I pitched a game to Lucas Arts. Sent a letter and everything. Their lawyers responded telling me why they cannot make my game.
Feel like that opened something in me..
What was the reason? Anything beyond concerns over ownership of the ideas, characters, etc. (which I presume is the boilerplate legalese)? Did they even admit to reading your letter?
In elementary school, a couple friends and I sketched out an entire game's worth of ideas for Mega Man bosses and mailed them to Capcom (this would have been 1990 or so). I remember how thick the envelope was.
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.
Funnily enough - they do actually take fan submissions for bosses - https://megaman.fandom.com/wiki/Boss_character_contest - but you’d need to do it during the development time, and probably mail into Capcom JP. Bad luck, there.
This was a very common thing media companies dealt with and still deal with. There are too many legal risks in even reading the idea. SOP is to send back the envelope sealed and with a canned response explaining that they don't accept pitches from the public.
I can't remember what the topic was, but I remember hearing a story about a company that was soliciting ideas from the public for maybe a joke book or maybe tv show plots. They got into a lot of legal hot water once they found out that the ideas weren't original and people were actually just taking them from other sources.
If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.
How do they know what they are not reading if the envelope is still sealed?
they have to open the envelope to see what's inside - they get mail that is not ideas and they have to open it.
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.
Yeah, it was about the ownership of the characters that was at-issue IIRC. From memory, they said they couldn't use the characters because I made the suggestion.
When I visited the Warner Bros studios, they had a huge pile of paper in a corner, representing all the unsolicited ideas they receive.
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.
Yeah, movies are kind of weird like that. If I steal your idea for a novel (but not your words), you can call me out as an asshole but you don’t have any legal recourse, but if the same thing happens with a movie, apparently it is possible to sue and actually win significant damages.
FYI, in many (most?) legal systems, you can sue anyone, for anything. To win the damages, you'll have to convince a judge or jury of said damages (or present a strong enough case to settle out of court).
Thus my saying, “and actually win”
Having a convincing case is usually a prerequisite to win. This is probably a good thing.
Probably this, but despite that people keep trying - e.g. Reddit's gaming forums are full of "I made a concept for xyz!".
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).
HAHAHAHAHA I DID TOO!!!!!
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.
Amazing. Just texted my mom asking if she has the letter. I doubt it all these years later but I'll share it if she still has it!
Edit: no dice!
Similar age; similar story to many others' here. I "designed" so many things as a kid... including this spaceship: https://yesteryearforever.xyz/spaceship_cross-section
I remember the wiring, pipes, everything actually went somewhere and was meant for something. Nothing was just for looks and everything served a purpose.
Still hasn't been built to this day ;P
Wow that's impressive work - surely you can get some VC funding together to give it a go??
When I was 8 I sent a letter to LEGO about a line of toys that slid down on stair bannister's. I gave it to my mom to send to them but apparently she betrayed me and kept it for herself because she thought it was "cute". Thanks to her I don't work for LEGO :(
She should have sent it! The first person to disrespect a child is the loser, and shouldn’t be the child’s parent.
I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that.
I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular expression. Ha, how naive. My dream was to receive a letter back saying how a good idea that was and that I was hired.
Unfortunately I never got a response back.
I remember getting on the gmail beta as a middle schooler and sending feedback. They implemented three of "my ideas" and called them the "Most requested features" each time, so I figured I was the only one sending in feedback lol.
I often think about how Ask Jeeves had the last laugh in the age of LLM-powered search.
lmao, I was just thinking about this yesterday. My parents would do the same thing and I would try to correct them and explain how they can get better results just typing keywords and not sentences. And here I am in 2026 typing full sentences in Google search so that AI can present me the exact answer directly in the search results.
At 8 I pitched a rocket car to the DoD and got a letter from my congresswoman and the Secretary of Defense. They were a bit bored pre 9/11 i think.
It was more likely written by a staff member who thought it would make your day, and signed by the Secretary of Defense. It is pretty neat that you got two letters though, because your letter probably got passed around and made the day of several people.
Yeah you’re right. The local news came to my house too and filmed me playing with my hot wheels volcano blowout set like i was some kind of child prodigy. So embarrassing lmao.
I did a similar thing with a car design for Mercedes-Benz when I was around the same age. I had all the car drawing books and really thought I was going to be a car designer. Much to my surprise, they responded with enthusiasm and even sent me a Mercedes-Benz keychain :)
At age 13 I pitched a candy idea to Mars Bars as part of a school project to write business letters. I loved Snickers at the time but was tired of unwrapping so many fun-size ones from Halloween. I told them something like - “you should just put the fun-size candies in a big resealable bag, so people can eat as much as they want without dealing with the wrappers. You can call them unwrapped minis. All you have to do is create new packaging and re-use the fun-size bars!”
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
8 months later sounds too short to have taken your idea, I'm guessing launching a product at Mars scale takes like 2 years. This is probably why the always say they cannot take ideas sent by external people... but on the other hand if this came from the CEO, probably could be fast tracked. So 80/20. Do you remember who was the CEO?
Only vaguely related, but the Mars family lived in neighboring River Forest and the factory was just north of me in Galewood (it is shutting down or already shut down and the property is planned for redevelopment, but the neighboring Metra station is named “Mars” which means that in Chicago you can take a commuter train to Mars). Sadly the Mars estate was apparently torn down to be replaced with a pair of bland McMansions.
That’s a shame. Annhueser Busch turned one of their estates into a tourist trap. But you couldn’t pet the horses, which is literally the only reason an 11 year old would want to go near a brewery.
Grant’s Farm? I always enjoyed it as a kid, trains and weird animals.
Silly person, Mars is a city in PA, not a train station in Chi-town.
The Moon is located just east of the Pittsburgh Airport.
It's packaging an existing product differently than a fully new product. Would still require either new machines or adapting existing machines for it.
I wonder if they have a policy about not accepting ideas / replying to people don't think their idea was stolen. I know TV shows have that policy so nobody can accuse them of plagiarizing their script idea.
And yet we get copycat movies all the time where clearly someone stole an elevator pitch or eavesdropped at a coffee shop and ran with it.
I sent steve jobs (sjobs@apple.com) an email saying that MacOS should have an unspoofable dialog for the system password authorization, same way they have for DRM videos etc. I also suggested the user could choose a secret phrase or image to be displayed in the dialog during system setup. Never heard back. This was when Steve was alive and in charge. And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password…
I emailed him in 7th grade asking if Pages could automate bibliographies. In hindsight, EasyBib was good enough.
>And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password
TouchID solves this in a sense.
Make it look like the TouchID isn't working and switch to password mode, boom. User password obtained
I always wonder about how easy that would be to spoof, because it seems like it'd be trivial.
...but obtaining that phrase may be nontrivial.
Sorry, I mean the current implementation seems trivial to spoof. I agree that doing something like your suggestion would make me feel much more comfortable about those logins.
You mean what Vista introduced?
I pitched a "crit Doritos" idea to Pepsi just recently, but sadly they haven't implemented it :-)
I am sorry to say this, but there is a zero percent chance your letter influenced their product roadmap in an 8 month timeline.
At the same age I was using the school's phone bill to phone beer companies and request they send me beer mats, so I could swap them with other kids in the playground. And they did, which seems a little off these days.
Reading this I wish I'd set my sights higher, figuratively and literally!
When I was a kid in the days of the discman, I came up with the idea of a cigarette-box-sized optical card reader that instead of spin the media it would scan the card and play the songs in it. I called it the "opticard" and thought that would be extremely cool to have some music cards in your pocket instead of carrying inconveniently sized CDs in your belt.
I wanted to write Sony about my idea but never got the balls. Years later they released the minidisc, still bulky, a total flop. The memory stick was a much better idea from them, I never knew why they didn't implement an iPod earlier than Apple
I grew up a nerdy kid in the 80s that liked military airplanes, and on the island I grew up on, was the HQ and manufacturing facility of a local manufacturer of military aircraft, that at the time was named Grumman. They were like a local source of jobs and pride and prestige of something cool to come from the island (second only to Billy Joel, the most famous celebrity of that era from The Island hahaha.)
Anyhow, when I was about 10, I wrote the CEO of Grumman a letter about how great they were talking nerdy about my favorite planes of theirs. The CEO wrote back with a short message thanking me personally. I was so excited, my parents framed it and put it on the wall of my childhood room, etc etc. Only as an adult, well into my 30s, did I remember that and think "OMG, of course his secretary or PR firm wrote that", but I truly couldn't realize that when I was a kid.
"That ten-year-old inventor is still alive in me, and still doesn't understand rejection."
ahhhh this makes me feel things
Cute story. This reminded me how in elementary school and middle school I used to draw pencil drawings of rollercoasters on my page to pass the time. Rollercoaster tycoon fan :)
As an adult that kind of feedback feels like a sales pitch. As a kid its unforgettable validation. Wonder when that change happened.
When I was a kid I sent a letter to Snapple telling them that they should make Snapple flavored popsicles. They sent me a nice letter telling me it was a good idea. I have not thought about it since. But I wonder if my letter directly lead to this disaster:
"Disaster on a stick An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."
Around that age, I wrote a letter to Tandy (Radio Shack), proposing that I write a hobby electronics book.
In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.
I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.
Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.
(Edit: I mean, there was a mailing address right there, on the back cover. In a kid's mind, why couldn't you simply mail a letter to that address. https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/page/n131... )
I once mailed the maker of a little German indie game called Clonk about wanting to learn programming. It was my favorite game for a while. Never heard back from him, which I found disappointing.
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
Wow, I didn't expect to see Clonk on HN today! Almost 20 years ago, as a 13 year old in the US I managed to make friends with an older player from Germany, and then we collaborated on making Clonk Rage mods together in c4script. It was an amazing experience and did help me get more into programming, so I'm so sorry to hear about your experience! I do recall members of the development team at the time being accessible and active in the community, specifically Sven2, but I'm not sure about MatthesB.
Thanks for the nostalgia though. Amazing game.
I think it must’ve around '98 when I played Clonk 4. I even downloaded some custom assets via an Internet cafe to floppy disks to play with them back home. The mail was actually a physical letter. Maybe the devs became more active later when internet communities started to grow.
I once wrote a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein to end her war on drugs when I was in college. I recall it discretely.
One thing I noticed right away: They never mentioned they would take some inspiration from the submitted design, or acknowledge any specific detail. So they can't get sued for IP infringement later, if they ever build a ride that shares any design details with the "Quadroupler"
I hadn’t realized Hyperspace mountain in Disneyland Paris went upside down (and launched up) before I took my 6 year old on it - I was assuming it was just a replica of the disneyland one which I thought
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
I wonder how much of a role parents played here. Surely there must have been some help involved with resources, encouragement, and at least getting the letters sent?
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
This is amazing!
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
WED’s letterhead was immaculate.
Every detail about that letter is immaculate. Damn.
Comment was deleted :(
At age ~11, I sent a MSPaint design of a phone with two SIM cards that you could switch between physically on a phone.
I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond.
Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.
Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
I just love everything about this.
I love that kids could be left alone in their home and would burn plastic over a gas stove to create models of roller coasters.
I love that Disney would respond to him and not even forget the typo in quadrupuler.
I love that he kept all that and thought of it as a foundational part of his personality (I think probably he was already like that)
It's a nice reminder of how impressionable kids are. A little encouragement can go a long, long way.
They did forget the typo though, the transcript is wrong.
Ah! Well spotted!
makes me sad nowadays kids just want to watch short form video instead of create
Reading the letter from WED has confirmed a deep suspicion about myself. I am a dyed-in-the-wool cynic.
They sent our boy an advertisement.
Oh, joy, where’ve you been left?
At least you tried pitching something I used to write long emails to Riot Games back when League first came out cause I kept losing games haha
Comment was deleted :(
I really wonder where some people get this marvelous drive to create - as it apparently has resided in the author even before Disney replied.
I once emailed the (former) Logitech CEO asking them to produce a popular keyboard in a different layout than thier current product offering.
I actually got a personal response thanking me for my input!
Then a few years later that keyboard I wanted actually became a product.
Not sure if I really influenced their process or not; but I got that keyboard and its fun to think I did :)
So wonderful that someone at WED Enterprises chose to reply encouragingly to a 10-year-old kid. “They rejected it straight away, they don't accept unsolicited ideas” or ignoring altogether seems to be the standard legally-defensive response.
Love it. Reminds me of when me and my friends got tired of launching model rockets straight up, so we designed and built a shoulder-mounted model rocket launcher. We made similar drawings and made some dumb mistakes (a face full of rocket heat is scary), but we ultimately succeeded. Kids learn a lot through playing and dreaming.
The best part about it is his rollercoaster the Quadrupler would have been much more fun than Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
It doesn’t even go upside down once, let alone 4 times
But it does have a goat chewing dynamite.
This post and comments are wonderul
> I've invented several patented board games that were shopped around but never sold.
I'm curious about this - I thought it was a very expensive process to patent something.
Yup, me too. In fact, I might consider simple copyright for something like a board game. Granted, I’ve never registered an actual copyright either. I suppose I should try it out.
I sent this to Apple in 2007. Never heard back :) https://i.postimg.cc/52G8rGZJ/File0004.jpg
Great stuff! Reminds me how I used to bother a lot of game publishers when I was younger
In 2000 I was in a startup which used yellow and blue colours for all its graphic design (website, app, etc). For a big trade show (IBC Amsterdam) someone thought it would be cool to give away M&Ms, but only in yellow and blue of course ! So we bought many bags of M&Ms, and sorted them out by hand... That wasn't a good use of our time, plus we had tons of red, brown and green M&Ms to eat while working and we were getting diabetic fast. So Marie called Mars to ask if it was possible to buy only yellow and blue M&Ms for our trade show. And you know what happened? Mars sent us a huge bag of each colour for free !
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
Wow, he’s my age. I can’t imagine doing what he did at the age of 10. Impressive.
Better than many of my rollercoaster tycoon creations.
I suspect his persistent confidence was already there to lead him to write to Disney in the first place. As a kid, I had an idea like that and my Dad was going to write to the company but he never did, I never had the inclination to do it myself, and now I'm not an actor.
It also takes some awareness to state your age at the start of the letter. That's what makes people respond so well to it. I would never have thought age was relevant, or even that it was shameful to admit you're just a child. I didn't understand how people think. This guy apparently did, so again, he was already cut out for acting, I'd say.
Good insight. Yes, I do remember at the time, purposely thinking I must lead with my age knowing instinctively that somehow that would help me and they would be more likely to pay attention.
>"It's called the quadrupler"
Drop the "It's called" it's cleaner that way.
Note to self. Build time machine and fix this.
Now, with a tear in my eye, I wanna know about Tom. I hope this post gets to him somehow.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Tom_Fitzgerald
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
He sent the letter in April 1979! He was only 3 months into the job.
Classic, have the new guy deal with the fan mail.
He still works at WDI.
Nice!
"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"
[dead]
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code