My Rubbish Competition Entry

I am a massive fan of Videogamer.com. As well as having one of the best (if not THE best) weekly podcasts, I find their reviews entertaining and think that they have some understanding about core game design.

The video gamer forum is a friendly place and once month they hold a competition that is usually to draw something rubbish. This month, the competition was to create a new mascot for the next generation or revive an old one. I got a burst of inspiration from this and set about creating mine. I have two pages of sketches and an A4 of story elements for his back story before I had to slap myself and stop.

Below is what I posted although it is but a fraction of the overall idea…

[animated gif so give it 5 secs, then another 5 sec)

In the distant future a video game AI (that controls all the online worlds) becomes self aware and accidentally kills all of humanity by keeping them in the game world. Driven mad by centuries alone it sends a digital signal back through time to the dawn of ‘always on’ online gaming to take over again but only enslave the human race…

Cut to a planet floating in space, sliced right down the middle with a wibbly blue line… This planet at the centre of the universe is the intersection between the 2nd dimension and the 3rd dimension. Gaming icons from the 2D realm visit the upgrade centre and get in a pod (not to dissimilar from the ones in The Fly’ and out of the 3D version of the pod steps a 3D ‘upgraded’ version that goes and lives its life…

Meanwhile back in the 2D world the old character steps out of the pod and returns to its life safe in the knowledge it has spawned an upgrade.

When the evil signal takes over the 3D world and turns all the gaming heroes and villains into mindless, zombie, robot, shadow type creatures, a beaten and battered John Spartan gets a message to the 2D world that the 3D world has fallen and that they will be next.

Many of the best heroes the 2D world has ever seen crow bar themselves into the upgrade pod to help but instead of replicating them all separately, it creates ‘Upgrade’ (I could go on but I think I lost you four paragraphs ago…

The heroes used:

• Link
• Sonic
• Mario
• Spyro
• Sub Zero
• Simon Belmont
• Aero
• Ryu
• Mega Man
• Haggar
• Piccachu
• Pac Man
• Metroid
• Bubble Bobble
• Zool

Can you imagine how upgrade would use a power up (and different parts powered up at the same time)