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Nition | 5 days ago

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!

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stevage|5 days ago

> "it may be a little hard to understand"

Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.

Nition|5 days ago

I always thought the catch-22 was funny where they say they saw that I was suggesting an idea ¾ of the way through the letter, so they chose to return the letter without reading it.

notpushkin|5 days ago

I suppose the legal department wants the wording of that paragraph to be very specific. It’s not only there for the kid, it’s for the court as well.

RyanOD|5 days ago

Love that they took the time to draft a kind letter and let you down easy. Maxis cared.

Dylan16807|5 days ago

I can't tell if you're joking or not about the form letter there.

It's such a terrible response for someone that was not in fact suggesting a new feature for the franchise.

And even if it had been, rejecting the entire letter for one sentence is still bad.

It's polite. Being polite is pretty much expected here.

postalcoder|5 days ago

Creative Writer is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. What's the state of kids software nowadays?

Nition|5 days ago

Pretty terrible in my experience. The good stuff for kids mostly moved to tablets and phones, but no keyboard and mouse is a limiting format, and you have to sift through a hundred bad apps to find the good one. Not much that runs easily on modern PCs comes close to the old magic. Though Tux Paint is actually very good, retaining the sense of whimsy that most modern software lacks.

It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.

Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.