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I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

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Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#11

Post by chaps »

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #8
chaps wrote: post #4

When I was 10 I pitched a game to Lucas Arts. Sent a letter and everything. Their lawyers responded telling me why they cannot make my game. Feel like that opened something in me..

HAHAHAHAHA I DID TOO!!!!! Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere. Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a…

Amazing. Just texted my mom asking if she has the letter. I doubt it all these years later but I'll share it if she still has it!

Edit: no dice!

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#12

Post by raphinou »

When I was young I wrote to the Formula 1 team McLaren to ask if they could hire me for a student job. I didn't expect to get a reply, but I got one. The answer was negative, but I was happy. I never reflected about it until now, but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer? Not sure that was the turning point, but this is indeed my approach! :-)

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#14

Post by joe_mamba »

raphinou wrote: post #12

When I was young I wrote to the Formula 1 team McLaren to ask if they could hire me for a student job. I didn't expect to get a reply, but I got one. The answer was negative, but I was happy. I never reflected about it until now, but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer? Not sure that was the turning point, but this is indeed my a…

>The answer was negative, but I was happy.

For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.

>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?

Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?

A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.

The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#15

Post by nogridbag »

These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games. Unless you were one of those weird kids that called Nintendo Power helpline of course!

I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzIc_c1PvE

I have no idea how I received that, but it was so cool!

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#16

Post by dfxm12 »

chaps wrote: post #4

When I was 10 I pitched a game to Lucas Arts. Sent a letter and everything. Their lawyers responded telling me why they cannot make my game. Feel like that opened something in me..

What was the reason? Anything beyond concerns over ownership of the ideas, characters, etc. (which I presume is the boilerplate legalese)? Did they even admit to reading your letter?

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#17

Post by 101008 »

I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that.

I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular expression. Ha, how naive. My dream was to receive a letter back saying how a good idea that was and that I was hired.

Unfortunately I never got a response back.

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#18

Post by Roedou »

I wrote to Sainsburys (large UK grocery store chain) in 1993, suggesting an idea for a "self checkout", where you would scan items yourself as you put them into your shipping cart. My anti-theft solution was that they'd weigh your cart as you left, to make sure you'd scanned everything!

I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"

Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#19

Post by ashleyn »

101008 wrote: post #17

I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that. I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular express…

I often think about how Ask Jeeves had the last laugh in the age of LLM-powered search.

Re: I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

#20

Post by nogridbag »

101008 wrote: post #17

I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that. I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular express…

lmao, I was just thinking about this yesterday. My parents would do the same thing and I would try to correct them and explain how they can get better results just typing keywords and not sentences. And here I am in 2026 typing full sentences in Google search so that AI can present me the exact answer directly in the search results.
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