At age 13 I pitched a candy idea to Mars Bars as part of a school project to write business letters. I loved Snickers at the time but was tired of unwrapping so many fun-size ones from Halloween. I told them something like - “you should just put the fun-size candies in a big resealable bag, so people can eat as much as they want without dealing with the wrappers. You can call them unwrapped minis. All you have to do is create new packaging and re-use the fun-size bars!”
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
8 months later sounds too short to have taken your idea, I'm guessing launching a product at Mars scale takes like 2 years. This is probably why the always say they cannot take ideas sent by external people... but on the other hand if this came from the CEO, probably could be fast tracked. So 80/20.
Do you remember who was the CEO?
Only vaguely related, but the Mars family lived in neighboring River Forest and the factory was just north of me in Galewood (it is shutting down or already shut down and the property is planned for redevelopment, but the neighboring Metra station is named “Mars” which means that in Chicago you can take a commuter train to Mars). Sadly the Mars estate was apparently torn down to be replaced with a pair of bland McMansions.
I sent steve jobs (sjobs@apple.com) an email saying that MacOS should have an unspoofable dialog for the system password authorization, same way they have for DRM videos etc. I also suggested the user could choose a secret phrase or image to be displayed in the dialog during system setup. Never heard back. This was when Steve was alive and in charge. And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password…
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 so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
if you ignore all the bitter, jealous, and/or obnoxiously pedantic people, kind of? if you mention age in a post (like, sub-18 age), you will get comments about silver spoons and privilege, as well as other comments about how the age of the person shouldnt even be mentioned because it doesnt matter.
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
We did Flat Stanley in second grade[1, circa ~2000], including mailing him to someone to send him on an adventure. I sent my Stanley off to Volkswagen and he came back bearing little toy pull-back VW Beetles and smelled like a new car…
Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
One of the things that got me in to "coding" when I was 9 years old was building tic tac toe in Excel, locking the window size to 3x3 cells and then implementing clicks as links to the next board state, with the "computer" having already played the next move. The whole sheet had every possible board state written out by hand.
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.
Ask a kid (preferably one of your own or a niece or nephew, etc.) to write to your local football team and see what happens. Some are good about it, some aren't. It helps if you send a letter to the correct department instead of sending an email to a generic contact address.
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
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! :-)
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.
You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.
I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....
When I was 8 I sent a letter to LEGO about a line of toys that slid down on stair bannister's. I gave it to my mom to send to them but apparently she betrayed me and kept it for herself because she thought it was "cute". Thanks to her I don't work for LEGO :(
There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.
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?
In elementary school, a couple friends and I sketched out an entire game's worth of ideas for Mega Man bosses and mailed them to Capcom (this would have been 1990 or so). I remember how thick the envelope was.
I recall their response being very human, warm and encouraging, but it also included all of our original sketches, with a very direct (but kid-understandable) statement that they were obligated to return the originals to make it very clear that they were not kept and thus could not possibly be understood to be "inspiration" for anything that might be in a future game.
This was a very common thing media companies dealt with and still deal with. There are too many legal risks in even reading the idea. SOP is to send back the envelope sealed and with a canned response explaining that they don't accept pitches from the public.
Yeah, it was about the ownership of the characters that was at-issue IIRC. From memory, they said they couldn't use the characters because I made the suggestion.
When I visited the Warner Bros studios, they had a huge pile of paper in a corner, representing all the unsolicited ideas they receive.
They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincidence, so they don't want to take any chance.
Yeah, movies are kind of weird like that. If I steal your idea for a novel (but not your words), you can call me out as an asshole but you don’t have any legal recourse, but if the same thing happens with a movie, apparently it is possible to sue and actually win significant damages.
Probably this, but despite that people keep trying - e.g. Reddit's gaming forums are full of "I made a concept for xyz!".
I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
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 different time.
I once mailed the maker of a little German indie game called Clonk about wanting to learn programming. It was my favorite game for a while. Never heard back from him, which I found disappointing.
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
I hadn’t realized Hyperspace mountain in Disneyland Paris went upside down (and launched up) before I took my 6 year old on it - I was assuming it was just a replica of the disneyland one which I thought
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
In 2000 I was in a startup which used yellow and blue colours for all its graphic design (website, app, etc). For a big trade show (IBC Amsterdam) someone thought it would be cool to give away M&Ms, but only in yellow and blue of course ! So we bought many bags of M&Ms, and sorted them out by hand... That wasn't a good use of our time, plus we had tons of red, brown and green M&Ms to eat while working and we were getting diabetic fast.
So Marie called Mars to ask if it was possible to buy only yellow and blue M&Ms for our trade show. And you know what happened? Mars sent us a huge bag of each colour for free !
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
One thing I noticed right away: They never mentioned they would take some inspiration from the submitted design, or acknowledge any specific detail. So they can't get sued for IP infringement later, if they ever build a ride that shares any design details with the "Quadroupler"
I did a similar thing with a car design for Mercedes-Benz when I was around the same age. I had all the car drawing books and really thought I was going to be a car designer. Much to my surprise, they responded with enthusiasm and even sent me a Mercedes-Benz keychain :)
Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
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.
I remember getting on the gmail beta as a middle schooler and sending feedback. They implemented three of "my ideas" and called them the "Most requested features" each time, so I figured I was the only one sending in feedback lol.
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.
I wonder how much of a role parents played here. Surely there must have been some help involved with resources, encouragement, and at least getting the letters sent?
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
Cute story. This reminded me how in elementary school and middle school I used to draw pencil drawings of rollercoasters on my page to pass the time. Rollercoaster tycoon fan :)
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
Love it. Reminds me of when me and my friends got tired of launching model rockets straight up, so we designed and built a shoulder-mounted model rocket launcher. We made similar drawings and made some dumb mistakes (a face full of rocket heat is scary), but we ultimately succeeded. Kids learn a lot through playing and dreaming.
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making
of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
At age 13 I pitched a candy idea to Mars Bars as part of a school project to write business letters. I loved Snickers at the time but was tired of unwrapping so many fun-size ones from Halloween. I told them something like - “you should just put the fun-size candies in a big resealable bag, so people can eat as much as they want without dealing with the wrappers. You can call them unwrapped minis. All you have to do is create new packaging and re-use the fun-size bars!”
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
8 months later sounds too short to have taken your idea, I'm guessing launching a product at Mars scale takes like 2 years. This is probably why the always say they cannot take ideas sent by external people... but on the other hand if this came from the CEO, probably could be fast tracked. So 80/20. Do you remember who was the CEO?
It's packaging an existing product differently than a fully new product. Would still require either new machines or adapting existing machines for it.
Only vaguely related, but the Mars family lived in neighboring River Forest and the factory was just north of me in Galewood (it is shutting down or already shut down and the property is planned for redevelopment, but the neighboring Metra station is named “Mars” which means that in Chicago you can take a commuter train to Mars). Sadly the Mars estate was apparently torn down to be replaced with a pair of bland McMansions.
I sent steve jobs (sjobs@apple.com) an email saying that MacOS should have an unspoofable dialog for the system password authorization, same way they have for DRM videos etc. I also suggested the user could choose a secret phrase or image to be displayed in the dialog during system setup. Never heard back. This was when Steve was alive and in charge. And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password…
You mean what Vista introduced?
I pitched a "crit Doritos" idea to Pepsi just recently, but sadly they haven't implemented it :-)
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!
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
Isn't that what happens when they post their projects on HN?
if you ignore all the bitter, jealous, and/or obnoxiously pedantic people, kind of? if you mention age in a post (like, sub-18 age), you will get comments about silver spoons and privilege, as well as other comments about how the age of the person shouldnt even be mentioned because it doesnt matter.
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
There were even books that listed the companies, their addresses, and the free things they’d send you.
We did Flat Stanley in second grade[1, circa ~2000], including mailing him to someone to send him on an adventure. I sent my Stanley off to Volkswagen and he came back bearing little toy pull-back VW Beetles and smelled like a new car…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley
A lot of companies and organizations actually reply to letters/emails of any kind. Often very appropriately and not just with some boilerplate text.
I guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.
Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.
At first, I was thinking you received a cease and desist :D
Ah yes, I did similar, I pitched a game idea I had called "shadowstorm", drew out a sketch of the protagonist and sent it to Sony PlayStation address.
They sent me a letter thanking me and said that they don't develop games in a nice way.
I immediately filed that letter with the orange Sony letterhead and still have it til this day.
Good times.
That VHS was one of my favorites. Me and my sisters would watch it over and over. Love how camp it was.
> weird VHS tape
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
I can see where a lot of youtube content creators (WizardsWithGuns comes to mind...) derive their cartoonish humour from
I don't think the magic left with the Internet, but with adulthood, some combination of your own and among the C's at the company.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
One of the things that got me in to "coding" when I was 9 years old was building tic tac toe in Excel, locking the window size to 3x3 cells and then implementing clicks as links to the next board state, with the "computer" having already played the next move. The whole sheet had every possible board state written out by hand.
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.
So you're to blame!
Ask a kid (preferably one of your own or a niece or nephew, etc.) to write to your local football team and see what happens. Some are good about it, some aren't. It helps if you send a letter to the correct department instead of sending an email to a generic contact address.
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
sounds awesome tbh. If you build it, I will come.
That's amazing!
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! :-)
>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.
You're right of course. I hadn't thought of the negatives when this self-restraint is absent.
I only sent one letter to one team because I was a fan. The restraining factor was being a fan. Remove that, and it can indeed rapidly go out of hands....
When I was 8 I sent a letter to LEGO about a line of toys that slid down on stair bannister's. I gave it to my mom to send to them but apparently she betrayed me and kept it for herself because she thought it was "cute". Thanks to her I don't work for LEGO :(
She should have sent it! The first person to disrespect a child is the loser, and shouldn’t be the child’s parent.
There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.
https://twitter-thread.com/t/1214607304106098689
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?
In elementary school, a couple friends and I sketched out an entire game's worth of ideas for Mega Man bosses and mailed them to Capcom (this would have been 1990 or so). I remember how thick the envelope was.
I recall their response being very human, warm and encouraging, but it also included all of our original sketches, with a very direct (but kid-understandable) statement that they were obligated to return the originals to make it very clear that they were not kept and thus could not possibly be understood to be "inspiration" for anything that might be in a future game.
This was a very common thing media companies dealt with and still deal with. There are too many legal risks in even reading the idea. SOP is to send back the envelope sealed and with a canned response explaining that they don't accept pitches from the public.
How do they know what they are not reading if the envelope is still sealed?
Yeah, it was about the ownership of the characters that was at-issue IIRC. From memory, they said they couldn't use the characters because I made the suggestion.
When I visited the Warner Bros studios, they had a huge pile of paper in a corner, representing all the unsolicited ideas they receive.
They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincidence, so they don't want to take any chance.
Yeah, movies are kind of weird like that. If I steal your idea for a novel (but not your words), you can call me out as an asshole but you don’t have any legal recourse, but if the same thing happens with a movie, apparently it is possible to sue and actually win significant damages.
Probably this, but despite that people keep trying - e.g. Reddit's gaming forums are full of "I made a concept for xyz!".
I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
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 different time.
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!
At 8 I pitched a rocket car to the DoD and got a letter from my congresswoman and the Secretary of Defense. They were a bit bored pre 9/11 i think.
I once mailed the maker of a little German indie game called Clonk about wanting to learn programming. It was my favorite game for a while. Never heard back from him, which I found disappointing.
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
I hadn’t realized Hyperspace mountain in Disneyland Paris went upside down (and launched up) before I took my 6 year old on it - I was assuming it was just a replica of the disneyland one which I thought
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
In 2000 I was in a startup which used yellow and blue colours for all its graphic design (website, app, etc). For a big trade show (IBC Amsterdam) someone thought it would be cool to give away M&Ms, but only in yellow and blue of course ! So we bought many bags of M&Ms, and sorted them out by hand... That wasn't a good use of our time, plus we had tons of red, brown and green M&Ms to eat while working and we were getting diabetic fast. So Marie called Mars to ask if it was possible to buy only yellow and blue M&Ms for our trade show. And you know what happened? Mars sent us a huge bag of each colour for free !
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
One thing I noticed right away: They never mentioned they would take some inspiration from the submitted design, or acknowledge any specific detail. So they can't get sued for IP infringement later, if they ever build a ride that shares any design details with the "Quadroupler"
I did a similar thing with a car design for Mercedes-Benz when I was around the same age. I had all the car drawing books and really thought I was going to be a car designer. Much to my surprise, they responded with enthusiasm and even sent me a Mercedes-Benz keychain :)
At age ~11, I sent a MSPaint design of a phone with two SIM cards that you could switch between physically on a phone.
I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond.
Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.
Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
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.
I remember getting on the gmail beta as a middle schooler and sending feedback. They implemented three of "my ideas" and called them the "Most requested features" each time, so I figured I was the only one sending in feedback lol.
I often think about how Ask Jeeves had the last laugh in the age of LLM-powered search.
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.
WED’s letterhead was immaculate.
Every detail about that letter is immaculate. Damn.
I wonder how much of a role parents played here. Surely there must have been some help involved with resources, encouragement, and at least getting the letters sent?
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
I once emailed the (former) Logitech CEO asking them to produce a popular keyboard in a different layout than thier current product offering.
I actually got a personal response thanking me for my input!
Then a few years later that keyboard I wanted actually became a product.
Not sure if I really influenced their process or not; but I got that keyboard and its fun to think I did :)
I once wrote a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein to end her war on drugs when I was in college. I recall it discretely.
Cute story. This reminded me how in elementary school and middle school I used to draw pencil drawings of rollercoasters on my page to pass the time. Rollercoaster tycoon fan :)
This is amazing!
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
Love it. Reminds me of when me and my friends got tired of launching model rockets straight up, so we designed and built a shoulder-mounted model rocket launcher. We made similar drawings and made some dumb mistakes (a face full of rocket heat is scary), but we ultimately succeeded. Kids learn a lot through playing and dreaming.
The best part about it is his rollercoaster the Quadrupler would have been much more fun than Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
It doesn’t even go upside down once, let alone 4 times
But it does have a goat chewing dynamite.
I just love everything about this.
I love that kids could be left alone in their home and would burn plastic over a gas stove to create models of roller coasters.
I love that Disney would respond to him and not even forget the typo in quadrupuler.
I love that he kept all that and thought of it as a foundational part of his personality (I think probably he was already like that)
It's a nice reminder of how impressionable kids are. A little encouragement can go a long, long way.
makes me sad nowadays kids just want to watch short form video instead of create
They did forget the typo though, the transcript is wrong.
Ah! Well spotted!
At least you tried pitching something I used to write long emails to Riot Games back when League first came out cause I kept losing games haha
I really wonder where some people get this marvelous drive to create - as it apparently has resided in the author even before Disney replied.
Wow, he’s my age. I can’t imagine doing what he did at the age of 10. Impressive.
This post and comments are wonderul
Better than many of my rollercoaster tycoon creations.
>"It's called the quadrupler"
Drop the "It's called" it's cleaner that way.
Note to self. Build time machine and fix this.
Now, with a tear in my eye, I wanna know about Tom. I hope this post gets to him somehow.
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Tom_Fitzgerald
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
He sent the letter in April 1979! He was only 3 months into the job.
Classic, have the new guy deal with the fan mail.
He still works at WDI.
Nice.