In 1994, I spent nearly 100 Canadian dollars ordering the Pie in the Sky 3d Game Creation System.

I don't think you understand how obsessed I was with sharing content.

I owned a total of three FPS games, and that time, one. I barely enjoyed most of them. I played maybe twenty Death Matches before GoldenEye, and didn't do much beyond the middle difficulty in Heretic. I got to level three in Hexen.

I never played Counterstrike or Unreal Tournament or Quake, and barely touched Doom. I just did not care for that genre.

But I liked to create.



Of course, if you read parts 1 and 2, then you already know this. Sharing games was part of a decade for me, experiencing other people's creations and passing along my own. I made quite a few odd FPSs in those years with friends or on my own. I made the aforementioned "Bill Gate 96" in which the gate of evil is about to spring open, unleashing horrible disfigurement unto the world. All I remember from it now is that there were horribly drawn cow enemies that turned into hamburgers when you killed them, and that the last boss was supposed to be 97 windows, but due to constraints, I had to make the sprites groups of 2 and 3. You just couldn't have that many animate windows.

A friend and I made a vaguely educational shooter for a chem project in which you escaped the three levels of Phospherous, shooting each of the electrons along the way.



Does that make me a huge geek? If your answer is anything other than "YES" then you've obviously got some kind of serious brain dysfunction and should seek your local physician.

This all sets the stage for the mysterious appearance of Klick N' Play. The game that entered my life through a combination of happenstance and youthful selfishness.

I think like all pre-teens, I was a selfish dick. I kept thinking stuff was for me, when it was for other people, or the cat, or the orphans. I wanted stuff too, and probably couldn't understand a single decent reason why I couldn't have it. But I was industrious, and for me, almost anything could be rationalized as a productivity tool.

That was how I first saw KNP.

We were in the West Edmonton mall, at least, I'm pretty sure we are. Memories from that period are about as clear in my mind as a burlap sack full of lead. I was in the upper area, distraught that I--that's right ME--hadn't gotten a video game yet. With my allowance, obviously, i did work for it. For some of it.

How could this human travesty persist? How could I possibly go without that elusive awesome game they only sold in Edmonton? Oh cruel fates, release this terrible soulful hunger!

And then, I saw a white box. There wasn't just one thing from a game on the front, there was something from ALL THE GAMES. On the back, it seemed to be claiming you could make all these things jump out of the mouse, just like on the front of the box.



And it was published by Maxis! How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, as usual, I didn't read the requirements properly, and for the first few months of owning the damn thing, I couldn't run it at home. Like rogue cops in a system gone mad, this forced Michael and I to have to work together. Eventually, even my brother joined us in at the ground floor, and then friends popped over for scripting help. We traded games, retooled each other's ideas, even contributed art and scripting, handing across those buggy 3.5s.

This is how gaming 2.0 should work. Not simple toolkits crippled at the engine level, but whole game-making systems so easy my little brother could use it. These became memorable sources of new content, new adventures totally unique to our own circle. The absolutely custom KnP experience.

Of course, on day 1, I found you actually couldn't make a flying ladder, something so simple as to have been around in 1984. Doing so was pretty much impossible. There were other major limits as well, which nearly turned the box into a shattered wasteland of missed opportunities. In fact, I think I would have destructoid reviewed it as a 5 or 6.

At first.



But constraints force new ideas.

After working as a team in a cluttered basement, we started to create. A 2 player Tanks clone (including numerous unique weapons) of Michael's creation became a staple of our gaming, more so than many games we'd bought, brought it from computer to computer on those little squarish disks. I got lost in Henworth, my brother's medieval anti-wizard propaganda. We constructed an enormous, sprawling platformer that actually later on made a Captain Hook sized splash on the Internet. We traded racers, and puzzlers, shooters and runners, even prototype RPGs that never ever worked.

We also could cater to our own sense of humour in a way that just isn't possible when you let other people make content for you. I made "Where's Baldo" a cruel and nonsensical parody of the Wally/Waldo series, Ninja Fighter II Super Turbo, which consisted of different coloured highly pixelated blocks beating the ever-loving crap out of each other.



In a sense, I think the floppy era was what drove this content through. Today, everything, no matter how trivial, goes onto the internet. To me, this feels like it stymies stupid ideas that are going to get mocked, unless the presenter themselves is either A) Very confident or B) An idiot. Disks are a private affair, a circumspect system, ideal for encoding. The Internet, on the other hand, is like printing the combination to your bank vault on the door, which also happens to be open.

Now, friend-sites have the opportunity to open up the private content portal, but nothing will be the same as those stilted days of disks. Whether that's all good, or all bad is up to you, really. Things are certainly different.

One day, of course, I want to dredge up those old KnP games and share them over these new-fangled tubes, but for now, they remain unique gameplay experiences that cannot extend beyond a single circle. They are the ultimate in individual gameplay experiences still sitting on old, dusty, probably scrambled 3.5 mix tapes.