I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawing lately, and it’s gotten me thinking about the whole creative process, and the influence of one’s own age.

Recently, an old friend of mine found material for a video game we were creating back in elementary school. It had everything kids (or rather, we specifically) wanted in video games: tons of levels, tons of bosses, tons of neat gadgets and enemies. It was a game we’d spend time on nearly every day during lunch, thinking up new ideas for it. Honestly, looking at the stuff we came up with, I’m a little jealous of what we created back then. These were the unfettered mindsets of a pair of 10 year olds, where anything was possible as long as it made video game sense, and back then video game sense wasn’t very sensible.

Then one day something happened: we started to become teenagers. Now, when we looked back at our materials, everything seemed so kiddy. We thought, if our game was to go anywhere, we’d have to update it to make sure it didn’t look like the game was only for kids! Keep in mind we were like 13 or 14, and of course the hilarity of kids trying to make a game not for kids practically writes itself. This was the age of people accusing Nintendo of not appealing to the older demographics enough, and when Rare decided to revamp Jet Force Gemini and slap a few extra years onto its characters. So we made the characters cooler and tougher. We tried to give the bosses more realistic proportions, closer to Dragon Ball Z than Dragons of Blue Land. It wasn’t exactly 90s extreme, but it was something close to it.

Eventually high school came and we worked on it less and less until it dropped off entirely until more recently when we began to uncover our old materials. Now of course, looking at the things we came up with early on, and then how we tried to change it as we got older, I sort of want to slap my teenage self for accidentally trying to ruin a good thing. Not that I think my ideas as a teenager were all that bad either, but in this one case that teenage mentality was trouble.

I truly think that what we were thinking up at the lunch table back then could still appeal to kids today, though we’d have to apply a more cohesive design philosophy to everything. The goal would shift from trying to replace the products of our childish maginations with something more “mature,” to trying to refining or childhood imaginations and keeping it from exploding out the sides.

Then I hear people say, “Why do you watch an anime that’s meant for KIDS?” and the answer is obvious.