alt Hacker NewsThese 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!
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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 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.
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!
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.
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.
That VHS was one of my favorites. Me and my sisters would watch it over and over. Love how camp it was.
At first, I was thinking you received a cease and desist :D
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.
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.
Man that tape. I wish I still had mine!
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.
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.