Remember when kids would design games by scrawling levels and characters on loose leaf paper, and then send those games to Nintendo in manilla envelopes? I can't remember the last time I heard about kids doing that.

The core element of all those "game designs" was MORE.

I had some friends that designed a game while I was on vacation. First of all, I was SO jealous. But it basically was the typical game kids would make. It was Donkey Kong Country 3, before it actually came out.

They wanted to be able to play as all the Kongs, plus they designed a new Kong called "Baby Kong" who hit enemies with a rattle. And they wanted to have all the animal buddies, plus new animals like an Elephant. So actually, they got pretty close to the actual game.

Except not really. Because they wanted Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong and Dixie and Baby AND Cranky, Funky and whoever to be playable. And they wanted Rambi and Winky and Expresso and ALL the animal buddies, PLUS the new ones. They didn't want to throw away the foundational characters of the series like DK and Diddy and Rambi. And of course, they picked what all the environments and worlds would be like, resulting in a ridiculously huge amount of levels. And so when the game came out and Baby Kong and the Elephant were replacements for the old content instead of additions, and most of the environments were rehashes of DKC1, and there were only a few more levels than the first two games, they were actually disappointed.

DKC1 was a massive explosion of a game. DKC2 and 3 declined quickly. They were about INSTEAD instead of MORE. After DKC1 was so huge, the right move would have been to make DKC2 with the same characters, plus new ones, with 80 levels. That took 15 years (and still didn't get it quite right. Screw you, Tikis and 90% remixed environments).

I designed my own game once too. It was a stack of probably 200 pieces of loose leaf. And every few pages, there were new obstacles and new enemies. And then of course there was a manual where I redrew all the enemies and powerups and explained what they did. I never got to the end of it, but I'm sure the amount of enemies was ridiculous. Why WOULDN'T there be different enemies in every single level?

Think about the series that just STAY HUGE one game after another. Grand Theft Auto III was a massive hit. Vice City then was 100% new content. And then San Andreas was more than just a city, but a region with multiple cities, and also 100% new. Despite the fact that GTAIII was already the most popular game in the world, the sequels were each more popular than the last.

Halo. Smash Bros. The first games were almost like tests. When they were huge hits, then the sequels just went bonkers on the amount of content. MORE. And the sequels kept getting more popular.

Pokemon. I mean, here's the perfect example. No game has defied the odds in maintaining it's popularity more than Pokemon. Every single new generation brings more than 100 new Pokemon and a massive new region. And honestly, that seems to be the entire secret behind the success.

And what else is true about Pokemon? Kids design their own. Kids draw 100's of butt-ugly new Pokemon. Same thing with Smash Bros. All the threads and discussion boards about Smash Bros on the internet are HUGE, and filled with threads where people just "design" movesets, and stages, and post giant lists of characters they want. And then people discuss at length about imaginary movesets and how they could be balanced! When Brawl came out and "only" increased to 35 characters, some folks were disappointed.

But then there's a game like Guitar Hero. NEVER has a game exploded in popularity so quickly and then totally died so soon later. What happened? They kept redesigning the guitar. Kept adding new instruments. And then they went nuts with the DLC. In order to make great DLC packages, you have to withhold great songs from the actual games. People know when they're getting ripped off. If Guitar Hero had kept to 1 game a year, and each game was nothing but 100 awesome songs and no new guitar, it would probably still be the most popular thing on earth.

How about the most explosively popular game of all time. Super Mario Bros 3. First of all, here's the perfect example of a game where kids designed their own. But what was the main thing the game did over SMB1? MORE. The Mushroom and Fire Flower weren't replaced. They just became the core of a bigger power-up tree. Bowser wasn't replaced. The Koopa Kids were added. Plus mini-bosses. The 8 world model wasn't replaced. The worlds just exploded from 4 levels with 1 castle, to 8 or 10 or 12 levels with as many as 3 castles.

Why hasn't any Mario game since then totally blown away our expectations as much? Even after rebooting the series 15 years later, it's not as explosively huge. It STILL hasn't blown away Mario 3 in terms of the amount of fresh content. The worlds are all rehashes. It sticks around the now "comfortable" amount of about 75 levels. And it's like we have to twist Nintendo's arm to even get those 75!

Of course kids aren't actually designing games. But all those old kid-designed games had the right outlook. They were simple, and optimistic. If a game was Awesome, we wanted the sequel to be Super Awesome. Not Awesome Remix. Not split up into Awe and Some to maximize profit. Bring back everything that made it Awesome, and then add Super to it, too.

Games feel dirty today. They feel corporate. The business models are too apparent. The strategy is to maximize revenue from each and every customer, instead of trying to make more customers, and make sure each customer's jaw drops and eyes bug out. The great games have that jaw-drop moment where seemingly deep into the game you realize "this is just the start." The level in SMB3 where Mario climbs into the clouds. The moment in Ocarina where you emerge "7 years later." Modern games instead have a pffffffft-inducing moment when you realize that content has been held out for the sequel, or the DLC, or "features" no one cares about, or that there just ISN'T any new content in this one; it's all stuff you did in the last one.

Game companies would do well to use the "game designs" of a bunch of 8 year olds as their specification documents. Of course little kids don't actually design games. But there's a big problem when ideas for sequels written in #2 pencil on wide-ruled paper sound more fun and exciting and rich than the actual sequels most companies, including Nintendo, are making.

Okay. That's enough ridiculously long posts that no one is going to read. I'll be back in 6 months.

Read the first paragraph. I started doing that once. I never actually finished it and sent it to Nintendo though. I was designing a Zelda-like adventure game. Awesome.

I created Pikmin... if anyone says I didn't they are lying! :[

 These days people like to sue at every chance they get,  so...

I designed an RPG it was like 300 pages long. I did dungeon designs and I drew characters and picked attacks. I spent alot of grade 6 creating the game. I thought if Nintendo liked the design I could get a job and be like Miyamoto. I sent it to Nintendo and never heard back from them, I'm guessing they tossed it in the recycling bin I mean who looks over like 300 pages of a grade sixer's art and designs.

I later sent a letter to Nintendo Power, I drew all the Nintendo characters I could think of on the envelope and included a letter asking what happened to my designs. Well I never got a reply back from NP and to add insult to injury my envelope never made their envelope art section and it was way better then half the submissions!

Nintendo crushed my creative dreams as a kid. But hell their games make up for the loss of my creativity, who needs to imagine things when Nintendo imagines them for you lol!

I did that with a few games but actually make more board games and more comics as a kid.  Actually, me and two other friends each had our own comic companies.  One guy kind of did out there comics and comic strips and me and the third guy had our rival brands like DC and Marvel. 

We all had our own characters and universes and even did the occasional crossover.

I never sent anything to a game company but I did send several of my characters to Marvel.

never did that well the sending part. In highschool me and my friends made alot of gamemaker and rpg maker games.  And we thought we were doing something lol know being in college for it really puts stuff in perspective.