My Ideas: To Boldly Rip Off Other's Intellectual Property

A long, long time ago (in Internet years,) I wrote about the first role playing game of sorts I invented and played with my friend. That sufficed for a while, but like I said, it was limited, and I tended to dominate the creative elements. In the meantime, I worked on some of my own projects, including projections of myself into fantasy, but we'll get into that more in a later blog. The bottom line is a new universe in a sci-fi/fantasy vein was being slowly created, and it was starting to take up my attention.

In the meantime, I found inspiration in a completely different way; a stupid one. You may remember Yoshi, the goofy little dinosaur Mario first rode in Super Mario World before he entered the brave new world of spin-offs himself. One of those spin-offs was a game I'm a little embarrassed to say I owned, but I was a kid and my parents got it for me, so no big deal. That game was Yoshi for the NES, which is silly since Yoshi made his debut on the Super Nintendo. This was a puzzle game in the era when "puzzle game" meant "slight variant of Tetris," and Yoshi was not the exception. But what really mattered here was that Yoshi had a simple two player mode that I played regularly with my friend. As we played, we bantered, we joked, and we made puns. We were in the 11-13 range or so, so the jokes were terrible, of course. At one point, we were joking about placing Yoshi in strange circumstances, and I suggested "Yoshtrek," which featured Star Trek with Yoshi as a captain. For some bizarre, surreal, ungodly reason, the term stuck.

My ideas outside of the game turned towards silly sci-fi epics with a bend towards humor and space exploration, with the whole Yoshi theme tying around it and my own universe at the center. Eventually, as the last RPG idea wore out, I started this one, on the assumption that all my friends would create spaceships and crew, with the potential of a silly dinosaur at the helm. It was even more free-form than my last idea, with whole aspects of the universe coming out of my mind at once. Part of this was necessary; when I let people design their teams, I didn't put any limits on how powerful they were. So many of my friends would have armadas with the equivalent of twenty Death Stars!

The entire thing was often ridiculous, like the very worst cases of escalating power struggles between power gaming munchkins and a railroading DM minus the part where there are any rules. It nonetheless somehow lasted for years before the whole mess collapsed. I'd like to think this was a testament to my storytelling skills. But I'm pretty sure it was a testament to how bored we were. Nonetheless, this was the first time I created a universe this large and complex. With time, the joke elements began to take more serious tones, the Yoshi concept was slowly phased out (later versions were just called Trek,) and, in the end, I had the basis for nearly every idea that came before or since. This multi-dimensional setting was where it all began for me, creatively, and many of the characters that are 15-18 years old now came from these silly little adventures.

The lesson here, I guess, is that inspiration doesn't necessarily come from saying "I will be inspired HERE!" Sometimes it takes taking something small and simple and letting it grow. Rarely does one have a decade to let it grow, but any time can be helpful if you don't give up on an idea. That is one of the reasons I'm posting some of these ideas online; to revisit them years after their incarnations. It's certainly not to brag, though dinosaurs piloting spacecraft arguably would be something to brag about.