That Troublesome Folder

At some point, we've all asked ourselves this series of questions.  "Why do I have this?  What am I holding on to it for?  Even if I cleaned it up and made it look real nice, what are the odds of having someone take this off my hands?"

This can refer to those multiple books of Pokémon cards that we have.  How about that one time we purchased both volumes of Weird Al Yankovic's Greatest Hits on an impulse from iTunes after discovering we liked that one "White and Nerdy" song? 

Okay, that last instance may be atypical, but guilty as charged on both accounts. 

My computer was getting a little slow recently so I decided to format the hard drive.  For the non-technical in the audience, that's a bit like the mine wiping device in Men in Black.  Everything comes off the computer like it never happened.  Obviously you backup the things you want to keep before doing this: music, important documents, etc.

In addition to these things, I always backup one folder that I just have a hard time parting with.  I fully admit to never looking at most of its contents, but it's almost as if this folder has a certain power over me that I can't quite shake. 

Disclaimer: if you were looking for a hard-hitting article on the current events of the day, check back next week.  I'm committing the ultimate blogging faux pas and asking the reader to come along with me on a trip down my own personal memory lane. 

A little history:

Back in the day (okay, so it was only like 2003), my cousin happened upon a piece of fairly simple game development software and a dream was born.  One 24 hour sleepover later, and we had our first game.  Plenty of sweat and tears (literally, some cousins were more patient than others) were put into it.  The concept was simple: two knights march across the screen to fight each other, first one to get in a clean hit wins.  Still, we were proud.

This was then followed by a series of crash and burn failures.  Sure, there were moderate successes.  Air hockey: think Pong but set it on an ice rink to a soundtrack of Kid Rock and Green Day music we didn't have the rights to.  It was never released, but it was kind of fun.  Word Wizard was an attempt we made at word prediction software.  It left much to be desired in terms of actual usability, but as a first effort, it worked.

Most of our concepts never got off paper.  There was the game about the renegade newspaper editor (seriously is it any wonder I'm a journalism major?)  who leads an underground resistance against the dictatorial government with overtones reminiscent of Orwell.  Then there was the grayscale Into My Abyss, an artsy action adventure title.  We even dabbled briefly in edutainment.  I wrote a script for one level in which Robbie Raindrop takes kids through water cycle.  (I kind of wish I was kidding.)

These projects failed for any number of reasons, but probably chief among them was that I could never really learn to program.  Knowing a little bit of HTML unfortunately does not make me the next Bill Gates.  As a result, my cousin ended up doing most of the programming work which just burned him out.

We eventually tried to do a comedy series in Sims 2 about our failures as a game studio.  Alas, our writing styles were unrefined, and it ended up being mostly bathroom humor.  I tried to reboot it a couple years ago, I even upgraded to Sims 3.  (When it comes to something like this, I consider $40 big budget.  I was in whole hog this time.)  Unfortunately, we never got the voiceovers done and by the time I wiped the computer I forgot the password for the storage of the digital download.  Why I can't recover it involves another comedy of errors which I won't bother going into.  I have four finished scripts if anyone's interested in developing a Web series.  :-) Maybe when Sims 4 comes out.

Nothing was ever going to come out of this folder.  I should just get rid of 95% of the crap.  I could blame it on nostalgia, but the truth is probably closer to laziness.  The finder has managed to survive another transition, and it will probably survive the next one.