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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feel like that opened something in me..
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.
Edit: no dice!
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 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.
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)