For Algernon and Charlie

I hate deadlines.

Perhaps hate is too strong a word. I know having a deadline makes me enforce a discipline I might not otherwise have. For example, I should have gone to bed a couple hours ago, but I decided to check one list I haven't read in awhile.

Big mistake.

Twisted Kaiju Theater is a lot of harmless fun in bad taste. Like their motto used to be, "Come for the poop jokes, stay for the K girls." K-girls being Kaiju Girls, or pin ups of interpretations of Daikaiju, or giant monsters. They’re quite lovely in a quirky sort of way. Some can be offensive, but that's part of its charm. The strip is a series of photos of plastic kaiju, like one of the many incarnations of Godzilla, or one of his enemies or allies in the movies, and word balloons are photoshopped in. Funny stuff. On one of their forums, one of the members posted a simple question: what kind of video game would we make based off the kaiju girls?

I should have just hit the back button.

I read a couple of the replies, and not knowing what they were talking about, I researched the genre of games that were mentioned. Big mistake. I've spent the past couple hours copying pictures, and making notes on these types of games.

I have a multimedia degree, and once upon a time I was pretty good with Macromedia's Director, and passable in using Flash. I forgot all my Lingo scripting, and I used the older versions of Flash, the ones that came out before there was ActionScript. When I was in school I focused on the Producer's track, the generalist in a generalist's field. I even made a few games back in The Day. The one I remeber was a version of Bomberman, using Dilbert characters. and instead of dropping bombs, Dilbert had to drop memos to get a certain number of characters to go to his meeting. Simple but fun.

A year or two ago, I met with someone who was looking for an aspiring game designer. I've always jotted down ideas since going to AIS, and so I answered the email. This was during the bottom of the dot-com bust and things fell through. I would have liked to seen the project completed, but to no avail. Perhaps someday, but not anytime soon.

So this evening was mostly an exercise in futility. I used to know how to make these things, I know how to set up the design documents, and could reasonably get things started, if I had a crew, some time, and maybe a budget to work with.

Story of my life.

There’s a book, “Flowers for Algernon,” that was also made into a movie. It was written as a journal, and the character, Charlie Gordon was not too bright. Algernon was the mouse that the experimental procedure was done on before it was tried on him. This procedure made both Charlie and Algernon smart, but it was only temporary. A similar theme was done on Nickelodeon’s show “Rugrats” where Chucky, who suffers form sinus problems, goes through a similar ordeal as Charlie, and the effects were also temporary.

I cried when I saw it, mostly because up until that time, I had forgotten the original.