Hacker News

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!

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.

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 wonderful that someone at WED Enterprises chose to reply encouragingly to a 10-year-old kid. “They rejected it straight away, they don't accept unsolicited ideas” or ignoring altogether seems to be the standard legally-defensive response.

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! :-)

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!

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..

> I've invented several patented board games that were shopped around but never sold.

I'm curious about this - I thought it was a very expensive process to patent something.

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 :(

Similar age; similar story to many others' here. I "designed" so many things as a kid... including this spaceship: https://yesteryearforever.xyz/spaceship_cross-section

I remember the wiring, pipes, everything actually went somewhere and was meant for something. Nothing was just for looks and everything served a purpose.

Still hasn't been built to this day ;P

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.

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.

Around that age, I wrote a letter to Tandy (Radio Shack), proposing that I write a hobby electronics book.

In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.

I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.

Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.

(Edit: I mean, there was a mailing address right there, on the back cover. In a kid's mind, why couldn't you simply mail a letter to that address. https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/page/n131... )

I grew up a nerdy kid in the 80s that liked military airplanes, and on the island I grew up on, was the HQ and manufacturing facility of a local manufacturer of military aircraft, that at the time was named Grumman. They were like a local source of jobs and pride and prestige of something cool to come from the island (second only to Billy Joel, the most famous celebrity of that era from The Island hahaha.)

Anyhow, when I was about 10, I wrote the CEO of Grumman a letter about how great they were talking nerdy about my favorite planes of theirs. The CEO wrote back with a short message thanking me personally. I was so excited, my parents framed it and put it on the wall of my childhood room, etc etc. Only as an adult, well into my 30s, did I remember that and think "OMG, of course his secretary or PR firm wrote that", but I truly couldn't realize that when I was a kid.

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 :)

"That ten-year-old inventor is still alive in me, and still doesn't understand rejection."

ahhhh this makes me feel things

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.

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 :)

When I was a kid I sent a letter to Snapple telling them that they should make Snapple flavored popsicles. They sent me a nice letter telling me it was a good idea. I have not thought about it since. But I wonder if my letter directly lead to this disaster:

"Disaster on a stick An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8321110

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.

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 once wrote a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein to end her war on drugs when I was in college. I recall it discretely.

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.

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.

WED’s letterhead was immaculate.

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.

I sent this to Apple in 2007. Never heard back :) https://i.postimg.cc/52G8rGZJ/File0004.jpg

I really wonder where some people get this marvelous drive to create - as it apparently has resided in the author even before Disney replied.

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)

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.

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 :)

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

Wow, he’s my age. I can’t imagine doing what he did at the age of 10. Impressive.

Great stuff! Reminds me how I used to bother a lot of game publishers when I was younger

I suspect his persistent confidence was already there to lead him to write to Disney in the first place. As a kid, I had an idea like that and my Dad was going to write to the company but he never did, I never had the inclination to do it myself, and now I'm not an actor.

It also takes some awareness to state your age at the start of the letter. That's what makes people respond so well to it. I would never have thought age was relevant, or even that it was shameful to admit you're just a child. I didn't understand how people think. This guy apparently did, so again, he was already cut out for acting, I'd say.

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.

Better than many of my rollercoaster tycoon creations.

This post and comments are wonderul

>"It's called the quadrupler"

Drop the "It's called" it's cleaner that way.

Now, with a tear in my eye, I wanna know about Tom. I hope this post gets to him somehow.

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"

[dead]