The most awesome video game blueprint ever

Title: Map of Screen I: M.I.A.
Date: 1989 or 1990
Category: Bad Ideas come from wasting time
Current Status: Sending it to EA

When I was a little kid and I became aware of side scrolling video games, I would draw my own video game ideas that usually involved terribly rendered traps that weren't even remotely drawn to scale. This continued for some time, even into 9th grade.

See, in 9th grade, I was in Honors Biology taught by Dr. June James, III. I won't go into detail on this here, because I have other material directly related to Dr. James and I don't want to use it all up on an item that is only kind of related to his class.

At any rate, I was bored in that class. Not because I found it easy, but because at the time, science just bored me. Pretty much school in general bored me, which is why I produced so much absolute nonsense during high school when I should have been taking notes on lectures (just wait... I haven't really gotten to those boxes yet). In Dr. James class, I set next to Neil "Skippy" Kennedy who had the unfortunate position of being one of the 2 or 3 people lower on the social class totem pole than yours truly. When the other nerds pick on you, that's pretty bad.

But, I was friends with Neil and for awhile, I genuinely liked the guy, even if his personality quirks sometimes made me want to punch him. So, we spent a lot of time drawing cartoons when we should have been paying attention to Biology. At one point, we had a "See who can write the smallest while taking notes" contest where we actually did take notes, but that was more of an excuse to see who could write the smallest. For the record, I won... I manged to write 7 coherent individual lines of text in between two college ruled lines of notebook paper.

Sometimes, when drawing goofy pictures and dumb Far Side wannabe cartoons wasn't enough, we'd create some craptastic thing like this. Apparently, we created some game called "M.I.A" and started creating levels for it. We couldn't fit each level on one sheet so we'd have to continue it on another sheet. I couldn't find Screen II, but I did find Screen III. If I find the rest of it, maybe I'll post the whole thing (if anybody even cares).

There's an obvious influence of both "Pitfall" and "Super Contra" to this. Apparently, it starts with the player's character escaping from his cell through an unexplained hole in the wall. Then, as if his captors KNEW he would escape at this very spot, he must choose between three tunnel things to try and make his escape. If his captors were smart enough to know where he would escape and then create death traps to prevent him from escaping, then A) why weren't they smart enough to build a cell he couldn't escape from and B) why didn't they just kill him to begin with instead of giving him the chance to escape. Villains... WTF?

So, 3 choices... 2 of them lead to death, one of them leads to possible freedom. Let's look at the certain death paths first.

Path #1: climb a wall, go into a room, and then... either fall through a trap door where you are electrocuted by an "electric beam" before you are impaled on some ludicrous looking spikes OR continue on where you must swing across a snake pit on a rope (why is there a rope here?), jump to the ledge, climb down another rope, and then get trapped in a small room that fills up with water and you die.

Path #3: slide down an incline into another room where you find a key that must have been left there by the weird looking dragon from the Atari 2600 Adventure game which will open a LOCKED SECRET DOOR IN THE SAME ROOM (why is it even locked?). Of course, this moment of pride is short lived as the secret door triggers an improbable looking gun... or possibly a giant cigarette... that shoots you when you open the door... or gives you lung cancer. I have no idea.

No, Path #2 is the "correct" choice. Here, you run down a long hallway into a circular room that has deadly "lasers" shooting everywhere. I assume they move around and give the player an opportunity to get past them, because otherwise, this is the stupidest game since the infamous "ET the Extra-Terrestrial" (again on the Atari 2600). Once past the lasers, you fall through a trap door and must grab the horizontal rope or else you will die on some other ludicrous looking spikes. If you manage to go the length of the rope and avoid the LLS, you get to jump down. Here you must crawl to avoid the physics defying "vacuum" so that you can climb up the ladder and go through the door to the next screen. If you happen to get sucked up by the vacuum, you can save yourself from some LLS by grabbing onto the "rope" that may actually be a giant earthworm. Use the rope/worm to get to another door to the next screen.

And that's all I've got at the moment. If I find screen two, I'll be sure to post it so we can find out what sort of stupid traps the player must avoid next.

Fan of The Last Supper

Title: Personal Fan depicting The Last Supper
Date: I have no idea
Category: Promotional Items
Current Status: Keeping it cool

I have no idea where or when I got this. No... freakin'... clue. In case you can't tell, it's a hand held fan, made of thin cardboard and popsicle stick type wood. On the front, it features a half-assed recreation of Leonardo's "The Last Supper." I say half-assed because it changes some aspects and has nowhere near the artistic skill of the Old Master.

For example, Jesus looks kinda annoyed here. Not really divine, or angelic, distressed or even really emotional. He really just looks like he doesn't want to be in the company of these noisy people.
And then there's the image of John to Jesus' right (viewer left) has been changed. In the original, John has long straight brown hair and here, John has short curly blond hair. Now, I'm not going to get all Da Vinci Code here, but to what purpose could this change have been made? Is somebody trying to pass along secret information via this goofy promotional item? Is this part of the church's cover-up scheme to whitewash the evidence of some crazy conspiracy? Or is it just a shitty artist who can't paint worth a damn?

I'd be more inclined to go with option "C"... I mean... why else would this guy have put Bevis in a picture with Jesus?
This, according to the back of the thing, was produced by the NBA. No, it was not given away at Mavericks' games or handed out to Lakers' fans... it's a DIFFERENT NBA. This one is The National Benevolent Association from St. Louis, Missouri. The NBA doesn't seem to thoroughly exist anymore but does still exist as a part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and is now the DBS which carries on the traditions of the NBA.

Oh yeah, and this was "Made In U.S.A." Aren't you proud?

Mailing Label

Title: Address Label from Colt West of Fox 18
Date: 1996?
Category: Random Scraps of Paper
Current Status: Recycled

Why the hell did I save this?

This was on a package sent to me by one Colt West of Wichita Falls who worked for the Fox affiliate up there. I'm not really sure what came in the box though, because my memory of actually dealing with Colt West places the exchange of goods in my living room.
Here's the story... back around 1996, I was all into toy collecting. Star Wars figures were coming back and I just got bit by the whole action figure thing. Playmates, who had the license to make Star Trek figures, decided to do something stupid and piss off toy collectors. They released a special edition Jean-Luc Picard figure depicting him from the fan favorite episode "Tapestry." The problem with this was that they only made a total of 1701 figures for this piece. That's a pretty small production run.
Despite not knowing jack squat about this figure, I found one purely by accident at the old Cherry Lane Target. I remember looking at the thing and thinking "That's gotta be a rarity!" Back then, though, eBay was just getting started and the web was a whole lot of lame websites and text discussion boards. So, I found a board devoted to toys and started asking around. The responses I received made it sound like I had the Holy Grail. There was really no way to gauge it's worth, though. So, I was kinda looking for a trade.
Colt West, a Star Trek collector started emailing back and forth and he had the two hardest to find Tick figures: Die Fledermaus and Man-Eating Cow. I actually collected Tick toys and these two were hard as hell to get, sometimes going for $75 apiece. So, we decided to trade. He'd give me the Tick figures for the Picard. And one Saturday, he came to my house and we made the trade.
Now, I think the reason behind the package that the above label was affixed, was that he threw in a couple of Batman: The Animated Series figures as well. He didn't have them with him when he came to Arlington so he shipped them to me instead. Of course, none of this explains why I kept this label.

At one point, I think the Picard figure peaked at about $1000. There are usually some on eBay going for $200-700, but it doesn't seem like they actually sell very often. This one was pretty much a disaster for Playmates and it's not a real popular figure. It kinda helped kill the line since so many collectors couldn't get one that they just gave up collecting since they'd never be able to complete their collections.

One other related story about this... Ray and I, who tended to hang out on discussion boards largely to just act like fools (I guess we'd be considered "trolls" now), decided to have some fun and we posted a goofy tale about going to Dunkin' Donuts and finding the ultra rare Tapestry strawberry frosted donut with sprinkles, mint in its original wax paper. Everybody seemed to like that and got the joke. I wish I could find a copy of the original post, but I don't seem to have one saved. Yeah, I didn't save a good piece of humor but I did save an utterly worthless mailing label. Go figure.

McDonald's Changeables Chicken McNuggets

Title: McDonald's Happy Meal Toy: Changeables Chicken McNuggets
Date: 1987
Category: Toys
Current Status: Recycled

You remember when Transformers were all the rage and they were on all the toy aisles and kids just couldn't get enough? No, not now... not that crappy ass Megan Fox Transformers crap where all the robots look like they were pieced together from junk found in a Fry's Electronics Store Dumpster and THERE AIN'T NO FREAKIN' DINOBOTS IN IT... no I'm talking 'bout the '80's. Ahhhhh... the '80's... ridiculous clothes, ludicrous hair, synthesized music, and all the half hour toy commercials disguised as cartoon programs a kid could could want... which means about a gazillion cheap pieces of plastic that kids would also want.
Of course, McDonald's, the soulless American corporation that can only tell the difference between the mammals they serve and the other mammals they serve because one set comes on a bun and is handed over to the other when they give McDonald's some money. Kids and their parents are pretty much cattle with money and McDonald's is damn good about finding just the right type of plastic cud to drive the calves wild so they are first into the slaughter shoot with their parents in tow.
So, back in 1987, a good three years after the Transformers first showed up, McDonald's rolled out the "Changeables"... small toys that transformed from McDonald's food into robots. Never mind the fact that they missed the point of what made Transformers so cool in the first place... it was two toys in one! You know, a car and a robot... or a plane and a robot... or a microscope and a robot... it was twice the fun. So, it seems kinda stupid to have things that change from a box of fries or a hamburger or a drink cup into a robot. I mean, yeah, it's still a thing that turns into a robot, but hell... how much fun can you have with a plastic representation of a styrofoam box? Unless you happen to be the Ozone layer or an artery, polystyrene containing fatty fried chunks of something vaguely like chicken isn't all that intimidating... or fun. To quote one of my all time favorite pizza commercials, "What am I gonna do with a box?" Think of the hours of fun a kid can have playing with a food container! Rescue kidnapped presidents by infiltrating the secret hideout in a bag of fast food! Stop alien invaders by waiting for them to order at a chain restaurant!
Anyway, the picture above is actually of the little paper insert that came with the toy. I'm not sure if I still have the toy. Probably, but it's probably in a different box somewhere.
I particularly like the instructions... because this is obviously such a complicated toy that it requires a Master's Degree in Engineering to figure out.