So one of the developers in one of the game dev groups I’m in finally released his game after 14 years in development. He made a few comments about it possibly being the longest delay in development history.
I’m 99% joking, but I have him beat on obscenely long delays.
40 years. No joke, 40 years. By the time I’m done it’ll probably be closer to 45.
That said, it wasn’t even a project for literal decades of that time, just something amusing I’d occasionally joke about. I simply didn’t have the skills or hardware to even begin the project until fairly recently. I can’t even pretend I was working on it by claiming I was doing design work like concept art, brainstorming moments, or anything else. At best it was just a lot of “wouldn’t it be funny if…“ and it isn’t like I spend much time even thinking about that.
For the record, I am not in fact a grown man who spends a significant amount of time obsessing over the god-damned Care Bears. It’s an established fact that my life revolves around food, monkeys, robots, and space monsters. Just ask my wife.
When I was in elementary school, two things happened.
- I started reading the “Be An Interplanetary Spy” books.
- The school also started pushing the Care Bears on us. Hard.
The Interplanetary Spy books were goofy science fiction Choose Your Own Adventure type books. I found PDFs a while back, and if you accept the age of the target audience, they hold up relatively well.
I despise the Care Bears. My friends and I were more into GI Joe, the Transformers, etc. And as stated above, I was really into the Interplanetary Spies stuff.
We all hung around in recess talking about how we needed to make a movie where the Care Bears got slaughtered by GI Joe, the Decepticons, Interplanetary Spies, whoever. We were just a bunch of stupid kids, so obviously it was never going to happen, but we had fun. Good times.
Fast forward a few decades. I’m now an indie game developer working on an FPS engine I intend to use for several games, kind of like how the original Fallouts (Fallout 1 & 2, Fallout Tactics) were more or less the same engine that got updated (bigtime in the case of Tactics) as they went. Likewise with the Fallout games since Fallout 3, Diablo, and a dozen other game series you’ve probably played. If you’ve played one of a series, you won’t have much trouble playing the next one.
And then I realized something. A movie maker I am not. But video games? Oh, that I can do. And thus “The Totally Not Interplanetary Spies Vs The Totally Not Care Bears” was born. It’s a working title. I’ll definitely come up with something that rolls off the tongue a lot more easily.
As I compile notes and make asset lists (as a very back-burner project), those old conversations with people I haven’t seen in decades come back to me. We came up with some truly screwed up things to do to the Care Bears.
Obviously I won’t be able to use the actual names because while I might get away with the Interplanetary Spy stuff, whoever owns the rights to the Care Bears would basically just show up and take my house. And then my wife would kill me, so at least I wouldn’t be homeless.
There’s also the simple fact that I already have a game world to set the game in, the Alliance of Independent Worlds. It has pretty much everything I need to make it happen already built in. It even has several groups inspired in part by the Interplanetary Spies. And if I need to make something new for this game (which I absolutely will, it’s the nature of game design), it becomes another asset for the Alliance at large. It may never see other use, but I’ll have it in the archives.
And since I’m explicitly not doing Interplanetary Spies and Care Bears I’m free to do whatever I want with it. As far as I know, the ISB never used chainsaws or flamethrowers, and definitely not a good old-fashioned twelve-gauge. Certainly not against the Care Bears. In my game you will be.
So yeah, have you ever giggled at the thought of committing mass murder against Care Bears with a variety of weapons and environmental hazards? At some point I’ll have you covered.
Why? Because I hate those fuzzy little bastards.