Making video games in fourth grade

In fourth grade my friend Jace and I spent lots of Saturdays coming up with ideas for video games. Most of the time they were just Crash Bandicoot: 3d platformers starring animals. The creative process was 100% choosing the animal. Because, you know, we’re making a game, dude – its gameplay will be like any other game. The key feature was the animal’s body type, because you could imagine it bringing new moves to the game. Cool new spin moves.

One idea Jace came up with was “Armadon: The ROCKIN Armadillo.” He drew a little ad for it with Pentel markers, and it went something like this:

ARMADON:

It’s tail slappin, lizard-grabbin,

monkey howlin, piranha snappin,

vine swingin, cop escapin,

And OH YES, you’d better watch out for the —

Tragically, I forget what you were supposed to watch out for. I think it may have been monkeys again.

Our ways were so cool that two other kids in our class wanted to make games too. We let them, but decided to say that my uncle worked for Nintendo and had given me a copy of Gamemaker 98, their in-house game creation software. As soon as we got some good ideas we could plug em in. So get working!

Instantly I started thinking about, “Well, I know Gamemaker is fake, but if we do get the opportunity to make a game, we’ve got to make sure that the new guys are shut out of it.”  Luckily, they weren’t very savvy: “That fool put his tracing of a gorilla in my possession…yeah, he’s not gettin’ that back.”

A little while later our game-making collective fell apart for unknown reasons.