Every game developer starts somewhere. Maybe it was a goofy little Twine project. Maybe it was a mod level. Maybe it was drawing a D&D module on graph paper, or scribbling their own Mario levels on notebook paper in class. Maybe it was inventing new "house rules" for Risk or Monopoly.

Everyone remembers a key moment when they first realized that they could write their own rules, design their own systems, tell their own interactive stories, and create their own virtual worlds.

Gamasutra reached out to several developers to ask about those moments and memories--their own personal origin story. We were overwhelmed and inspired by the variety of stories we heard, and we think you will be too.

Goichi Suda (Killer 7, Let it Die)

I played a ton of non-electronic games as a child. There was a war game played with a pencil that was very popular during my 3rd and 4th years at elementary school. You had to attack other players' forces, moving units such as tanks, aircraft carriers and fighter jets. For the map we used the back of newspapers to make hundreds of variants, with a fresh one to play with my friends every day.

After war games I made another game using pencils which was a racing game. As before, I made a new course every day to play with my friends. The biggest was a racing game with 50 levels, but it had complicated rules and required so much play time that my friends became complacent and didn't play that one.

It's a very happy memory, creating my own game and story and expanding on them. That was probably my starting point as a game designer.

Sam Barlow (Her Story, Silent Hill:Shattered Memories)

Usborne's 1980s game programming books are now available as free PDFs

As a child of the 80s, I was schooled on game-making by the type-in listings we’d get from magazines and dutifully copy out. And, more specifically the books from Usborne Publishing that would pull us in with the elaborate illustrations on the cover of dragons and knights and all sorts of magic.

As a teen, I made a series of text games that chronicled one of my friends’ search for romance; bawdy romps as much influenced by the BBC’s Bottom as by the Infocom titles that I loved. When I look back now, the heart of those games was a kind of antagonism between the game’s narrator and the intended audience, a kind of humor that came from making my friends act out their own humiliations. Already I was thinking about the complicated relationship between the creator and the audience in an interactive story!

Also, this was a game I made for my friends in Qbasic, Social Realism Dizzy. A hilarious parody of the popular but awful Dizzy games :)

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Paul Franzen (The Beard in the Mirror, A Stranger Comes Calling)

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I made an overlay for Clue when I was a dorky middle-schooler! I swapped all the murder-rooms for places like McDonald's and "Nintendo HQ." The weapons all became anvils, poisoned chocolate and submachine guns (I was going through a Wolfenstein phase); and the possible killers were all me and my friends. Great fun. I still have it.

I think it tapped into my love of taking things from my own life and sticking them in the games I'm working on, which later manifested itself in my game Cat President, where most of the character portraits were photos of my friends' and family members' actual, real-life cats.

Tanya Short (Moon Hunters)

Partial view of the world map of Aetolia

As a teen, my mother was (probably justifiably) concerned that I was spending too much time with our video game consoles, and cut me off video games entirely. However, what she didn't realize was that she accidentally pushed me into the open arms of MUDs, the all-text precursors to modern MMOs. I became downright obsessed with the characters, stories, and politics of these virtual worlds, to the point that I ran out of things to do and began volunteering my time to create and run worlds of my own.

Several years later, just as I was finishing college, I ended up working with Iron Realms Entertainment on their commercial MUD Aetolia. In 2005, I realized I enjoyed designing new characters and systems more than I actually enjoyed playing games. I already had a full-time job teaching English in Japan and yet I would spend hundreds of hours creating quests, areas, items, and hosting events. And it seemed I was good at it. After that realization, it seemed clear that I should try pursuing a career in game design, by any means necessary, and have a chance of getting paid for this thing I was willing to do for free.

Toby Fox (Undertale)

My first game was an RPG Maker 2000 game called Toby's Adventure and I don't remember anything about it except the theme song was a .wav of me singing and doing trumpet sounds with my mouth.

Lucy Blundell (One Night Stand)

The first game-like experience I can recall is probably when I was around 10 years old. I played a lot of Worms and Worms Reinforcements on my PC. My friend and I would play together, but instead of trying to kill each other’s team every round, we’d often make our own game by creating bases for our team’s underground. The idea was to create a secure base within a certain amount of goes, before endless airstrikes would fall down and attempt to destroy them. Whoever’s team survived the longest, won. We actually preferred to play the game this way, as it was a little less aggressive/ competitive.

Around the same time, I was also very fond of the level editor on Micro Machines Turbo Tournament 2. I just found it a little limiting and wanted to create my own levels from scratch. I remember drawing tracks on paper, though it never amounted to much more than that!

Marc Flury (Thumper)

In the fourth grade, I was introduced to LOGO (aka Turtle Graphics) on the Apple II GS. It was a simple programmable drawing tool. The assignment was to just draw some basic shapes, but I really enjoyed LOGO, so I went overboard and created a whole winter scene with snowmen, mountains, snow flakes, etc. I even tried to create animations by "overdrawing" different areas and having them "move" across the screen. My teacher was blown away. Unfortunately, I didn't really understand the relevance of what I did and how it related to actual programming or game development. It wasn't until many years later when I did anything with computer graphics again.

Build engine editor

In high school, I used the Duke Nukem 3D editor to build a level map based on my high school. I accurately modeled the entire building. It was a painstaking process and it took hours and hours. Like many kids, I was desperate to re-imagine school as a different possibility space than the one I was forced into. My high school experience wasn't that terrible, but it did feel like being in prison at times.

Now I wish I would have spent my time doing something more original and interesting, but at the time, building my own transgressive power fantasy was a mental escape. It's sad more kids don't have similar creative outlets. I don't want to be flippant about something so terrible, but when I see news about gun violence in schools, it doesn't really surprise me.

Anna Kipnis (Psychonauts, Broken Age)

Kipnis is second from the left

My parents often had dinner parties for their friends, whose kids were younger than me.  As the eldest, I was put in charge of entertaining them all.  The games I came up with for us to play together usually involved a known street game mechanic but with narrative twists.  

One such game I can remember that was a huge hit was a hide and seek + tag combo. The opening of the game was normal hide and seek rules -- one seeker, everyone else hid.  The twist was that the seeker was a hideous, scary, magical creature (making growling and snarling noises was encouraged) and had the power to turn someone who was hiding into a seeker by tagging the hiders as they were discovered.  The tagged hider immediately joined the seeker monster team and helped find others. The hiders, in turn, could run to a safety location, where the seekers couldn't get them (limited based on how many hiders were playing, so that not everyone could be in a safe area).  If the seekers were able to find all the hiders within 3 rounds, the seekers would win.  If there was a round where someone hiding couldn't be found after 10 minutes, the hiders got to turn back a seeker into a hider.  The hiders would win if in each round, there was at least 1 person who wasn't found within the time limit.

It's worth noting that this originally started as a much more simple game and that the rule set grew to include the safety zone and its limits, the idea that you could be turned into a seeker or back into a hider, and so on. The funnest part was deciding with everyone on what would be a fun rule to introduce and trying it out. There was lots of lively arguing over how long the seekers had to wait before starting their search, how long the rounds were, how quickly were the seekers allowed to move (maybe they were *slow* monsters!), what kinds of powers the seekers would have, and so on, but it was really cool to see that the kids would nearly always come up with mechanics ideas that were primarily motivated by the fiction of the scary seekers, rather than dry balancing considerations. I really loved watching them really get into those monster roles (even when it tipped off the hiders to their presence -- it was a great morale-breaking tactic).  

Since I was the oldest, I got to decide on which rules became official, but the ideas came from everyone and the best part was feeling like the game fiction came to life, shared by everyone, and was no longer just a vague idea in my head.  Kids got so into it that they had very strong opinions on the direction it should go and even came up with back stories for the monster seekers.  We never did get the balance right -- the difference in ages made this really tricky -- but because there was a playful aspect to the game where we could pretend to be monsters or try to escape them, we all had fun anyway.

Reading this over, it really sounds like a zombie game. :D  But note that in the USSR, we didn't have zombie movies, so they were explicitly not zombies but some sort of folktale creatures.

James Earl Cox III (You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter)

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I made my first complete game when I was 13. It was a card game, drawn on notecards with crayons and pencils, with a printed uniform back, all hand laminated together. The game was called Thriblets, and it was a battle resource management game. I remember making the game to overcome issues I had with Magic the Gathering. Not all my friends could afford Magic cards, and when they could, those of us with more money would usually have the better decks.

I wanted to make a game: