User-Generated Content Before User-Generated Content

[freshfeeling]

Although I am a retro gamer, it’s funny because in my youth I felt very much like a late adopter. It’s true that my brother had an Atari 2600 when I was very young, but that was his, and it was relatively rare (and special!) when I had an opportunity to play it. The same was true when it seemed like all of my friends had an NES and I didn’t. The first gaming system I owned personally was a GameBoy that I got in summer 1990, and I got an NES about a year after that. Getting an NES later than my friends didn’t curb my enthusiasm about games, though. In fact, it may have augmented it. Without access to video games themselves, I’d often indulge myself creatively in relation to the games I wished I was playing. This may sound kind of sad now when I think about it, but some of my memories of how I engaged with gaming as a hobby actually feel quite special to me.

Before I even knew about the NES, I loved drawing mazes. I drew mazes on every scrap of paper I could find and I’d try to get my parents or siblings to do them, which naturally they all got sick of eventually. One day I had the brilliant idea to buy a blank notebook and fill the entire thing with mazes. Drawing mazes was a legit passion for me for a part of my childhood.


My dad was something of a business person when I was young - with typical 80s businessman equipment - and one day I noticed in his briefcase that he had a pad of grid paper. I was legitimately excited to learn that grid paper existed because it was going to revolutionize the way I drew maps and mazes! For my birthday one year I asked for a pad of grid paper, and my parents delighted me by giving me a stack of five pads of grid paper. I was probably 4 or 5 and had no idea the cost of things; it may have been nice for them that this thrilling, successful birthday present may have cost them a buck or two.

Sometimes I tell the story of my special relationship with the original Final Fantasy. It relates somewhat, so here it is:
Final Fantasy is a game I was obsessively in love with before I had ever played it or even seen it in person. In 1990, someone in my class brought the Nintendo Power Final Fantasy Player’s Guide to school and left it on our classroom bookshelf. Though I did (and do) appreciate the game, I am not sure what it was about that guide that drew me in... but it did. I read it cover-to-cover and started immediately processing the game’s data in my mind. I’d come up with party combinations and consider how they’d deal with the game’s challenges… and this was roughly a year before I’d own the game.

When I finally got a copy of Final Fantasy myself at Christmas 1991, I remember distinctly that I woke up at about 5am on that freezing Boxing Day morning to play it before anyone else woke up, wearing just a bathrobe. Without exaggeration, there was a feeling of adrenaline at being able to experience it.

So, for a video game-obsessed kid with limited access to video games, either because of a lack of means or being ordered to turn the games off every once in a while, what else does that kid do? Well, for me, it was back to drawing mazes on grid paper! I used to constantly draw maps for games as if I could mod them or something - an ability I wouldn’t have for a long time. I drew tons of Final Fantasy-esque dungeons and about a million levels for Super Mario Bros. on paper. The dungeon maps were fairly detailed, with connected doors and treasure boxes. I don’t think any of these drawings have survived in the 30+ years in between. My mom accumulated a large bin of artwork and such from my childhood that I have in my basement, but I haven't found any of these drawings. If I find any, I'll share them.

It started with scattered pages of Mario maps, and then when I saw the style of level layout produced in Nintendo Power, I took to that. I'd draw out my own levels, block-by-block, noting the initial starting position of enemies and the locations of power ups. There would always be a few secrets. I would group these drawn level maps by environment type, which I guess was creating "worlds". Like with the mazes I drew when I was younger, these video game maps would be scattered pages before I tried to collate them into booklets. This was completely self-indulgent; I had no particular illusions that they would ever be meaningful to anyone other than myself.

Although... actually, there was one small group of people who were interested. I had at-least-as-obsessed younger cousins who would want to check out my game maps, and eventually they all did the same thing, producing copious pages of drawn game maps - of course I always generally thought mine were better. One time, after watching an episode of PBS Kids show Ghost Writer where I learned all about copyright infringement, I gave my roughly 9-year-old cousin a stern lecture about how he had to stop creating Super Mario-related content because he didn’t own the rights to Mario. He took it really hard… but quickly drafted a plan for a game called Rug-Bee where a bunch of bees were stuck in a rug and the player needed to vacuum the bees out of the rug. The fact that I remember it decades later might suggest there was something there! His drawings were amusing but I don’t think the Rug-Bee IP went anywhere.

On a small number of occasions, I took my user-generated content for games to the next level, and made what was essentially a LARP based on games. I remember doing a Final Fantasy based one that I played, again, with cousins, telling them, "You can be Yang, and you get a spinning kick!" and so on - I think before I actually played Final Fantasy IV and had only read about it. I don't think my cousins understood what was going on but I guess they indulged me.

Also with cousins, I had a really complex Metroid thing where we'd run around a sandy playground collecting beams and power ups, all of which had stats documented on scraps of paper. This Metroid LARP-like phenomenon had items, imaginary enemies, and characters from the first three Metroid games as well as the Nintendo Power Metroid comic. Each beam had its own properties and a sort of additive power (like combining beams in Super Metroid), and you'd need a certain number of shots at some power level to beat the imaginary aliens. The interesting thing about documenting stats and rules on scraps of paper related to an imagination-based game is that I don't think I was even the least bit aware of Dungeons & Dragons or other TTRPGs at this time.

Eventually, this tendency to make a "rules system" and run a game with it would translate into partly original, partly derivative roleplaying games I'd run on IRC... still years before I would try a TTRPG myself. But my IRC gaming is a rabbit hole only tangentially related to user-generated game content, so that may be a topic for another time.

Another thing I drew constantly as a youth - even through high school - was magic swords. I was always drawing named swords with different properties that I would envision my Final Fantasy characters finding and using; I must have drawn nearly as many swords as Matthew Wills.

The reason I bring up my obsession and my abundant video game-based scribbles is because of the topic of user-generated content, even without a game, even without technology to support it, a person with a strong enough ties to something is going to find their way to expand upon the world they love - a similar idea to obsessive fan-fiction writers (which I am not). I was making user-generated content for my favourite games before it was even an option, and as the ease of user-generated content ramped up through the 2000s it’s an idea that remained close to my heart.