in the early 2000s.
acquaintances and never recover"
an autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen, the lead developer and designer of Hypnospace Outlaw, Dropsy, and Slayers X
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it's fine though, i don't think i deserved the honor. they gave me an expository essay prompt to "explain what makes a Historical figure notable" (or something like that??) and I instead penned a comedy-fantasy with a shoehorned-in Lincoln cameo. my influences were narrow so it probably read like an unserious R.L. Stine short minus the horror. towards the end i threw in a cheeky joke about not following the rules hoping that my judges were amenable to snarky little scofflaws. i guess they were.
Floral Avenue Elementary in Bartow, FL
this was often a thing with me. starting at the age of 8 i simply would (could?) not start assignments i found too challenging (long division destroyed me. it snowballed into never passing pre-algebra by my senior year of highschool) or creative exercises i found pointless (persuasive essays. why would I try to persuade someone regarding a topic I had no interest in or knowledge of?) and instead opted to write short form fantasy and science fiction stories or draw detailed maps of made-up places.
i was also bonkers about computers and the World Wide Web, though we couldn't afford a PC and i suspected we never would. didn't stop me from picking up the itch from TV, magazines (begging for PC Gamer and PC World mags at the supermarket was a thing i did a lot) and any middle-class acquaintances who'd let me spend the night at their cool houses. the 'information superhighway' metaphor was particularly exciting to me and my young mind took the early ads portraying people flying through cyberspace slightly too literally.
i first used a computer myself at an unofficial before-school daycare program that this saintly special needs teacher ran. she was often busy so she'd let me use the classroom Mac (a Power Macintosh 5200 LC to be exact) and it was heavenly. i most often played Oregon Trail, The Incredible Machine 2, and whichever version of KidPix she had.
in 1997, after like 4 years of incessant begging, my parents took out a bank loan and purchased a Packard Bell Multimedia PC from Best Buy. it looked like this:
source: The Nostalgia Mall (YouTube)
by that time i'd collected enough magazine demo discs and thrift store games (i'd read the manuals for fun) that i had a few things to play, though it would be another two years before i could convince the parents to go in for internet access.
at 11 years old I was diagnosed with ADHD Primarily Inattentive, which in my case means that i don't do (or remember to do) things that i'm uninterested in without a disciplined routine or medication. i did take meds for a few months but stopped because i kept forgetting. my parents were too busy trying to make ends meet to push me on it. i was embarrassed about the diagnosis and wasn't sure if ADHD was real or if I was just being a lazy turd.
my first year of middle school (i was 11-12?) was my academic downfall. i never did homework and rarely turned in classwork. i was bullied often and made sure to ~stand up for myself~ resulting in embarrassing fights i never won. plenty of detention too. we had parent-teacher meetings every quarter about "turning a new leaf" and getting caught up on assignments but it never took. i soon gave up on school completely. my focus shifted completely to a computer program I had recently discovered called The Games Factory. that and Dragonball Z, Pokemon cards, and Eminem or whatever.
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before figuring out how to use The Games Factory to make games, I used its Animation editor to create flipbook-esque animations. stick figures blowing up or shooting anime energy beams at one another, mostly. the Animation editor was my first real taste of frame-by-frame animation, textbook margin animations aside, and thus another grown-up art discipline was demystified.
Gonna mostly call it TGF from now on.
to my mind, making games was a highly technical thing that only large teams of grown-ups could accomplish, so The Games Factory was a reality-bending discovery. I was never not thinking about my next game project. I didn't want to do anything else. School notebooks were now for mocking up game concepts, enemy beastiaries, and level designs. I took my backpack to restaurants and other family outings and spent any downtime scribbling notes and sketches.
The Games Factory's Library Graphics. Love 'em now, thought they were a bit cheeseball back then.
though I now have an affinity for the charming library graphics that shipped with The Games Factory, I balked at the idea of using anyone else's art in my games. the appeal of the craft of games for me, even as a kid, was the filling of a virtual realm with minutiae for others to explore and enjoy. i don't think kid-me would've agreed, but the process was more akin to tending a garden or a building a diorama than anything to do with proper game design. or maybe it was closer to building a haunted house in a garage. or planning a theme park. i didn't care about challenge or progression or scoring systems.
by the end of 1999 I had become a competent Microsoft Paint user and learned the fundamentals of pixel art just through messing around. there wasn't much else to do after i'd exhausted my shareware and demo collection, and we had no internet yet.
by the way, I wouldn't have known the term pixel art back then. i'm not sure what people called it in 1999 but it wasn't that. i think most Pixel Art terminology was codified by the Pixelation forum, which is a topic for different essay.
in late 1999, two years after buying our first computer, my parents caved again to my computer-related pleading. this time for dial-up internet access. i chose a cool username (Simdrone052) and signed up for the Clickteam forums. i spent most of 2000 learning how to design websites, making and abandoning said websites, downloading screensavers, and probably also downloading naughty Dragonball Z fan art. (actually I just remembered my friend Chris gave me a bunch of those on a floppy. thanks Chris.)
it was early 2001. middle school was almost over. i continued not turning in classwork. i had no idea how to act around girls. i was convinced that i was the ugliest kid on the planet thanks to the pimple constellation dotting my pasty face. typical awkward tween puberty problems i'm sure, but hard nonetheless.
the atmosphere at home was also an uneasy one. we moved to different houses so much that I wasn't able to maintain a real-life friend group and my social world became increasingly online.
by the summer of 2001 i only had a single real life friend left. middle school was over. my 8th grade art teacher (Mrs. Long, she ruled) scored me an audition at a fancy arts-focused high school. it seemed like the perfect place but sadly i decided that the judges would rather see traced pictures of Goku and Starcraft Hydralisks and Gordon Freeman than my own original artwork (which was cool, I was pretty good for my age) and they rejected me. my grades were also likely a factor. THANKS JAPAN. THANKS COMPUTERS.
i remember being convinced that i had already thrown my future away at 13. both my parents and teachers repeatedly emphasized risks of screwing up one's early education, and i was doing as poorly as any kid could while still technically passing. the only real option, to my kid mind, was to keep working on my art and games and hope that it would somday work itself out. and i did!
by late 2001 i had a personal website up with downloads of my Games Factory games and graphics libraries.
Site's Up!
My "RPG Library" for The Games Factory.
i was a regular in the #K&P IRC (basically old Discord) channel. users of Clickteam software called themselves the 'Klik community' after Klik & Play. Mostly anyway. i was one of the early dissenters who prefered "Click" but eventually fell in line.
Confessions of a Game Maker hater. I had to let people know that Game Maker stank.
2002 was my most active year in the Klik community. i released many "demo" and "beta" versions of games, which usually meant that the game was stalled by a too-difficult-to-fix bug and I wanted some sort of appreciation for my work before abandoing it. here's one of my three profiles on Create-Games, the most popular Klik community website.
I was constantly deleting my own stuff and making new accounts. Each time I'd improve my old work would seem embarrassing so I'd chuck it. Or that's my assumption anyway, I have no idea why kid me did the things he did.
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including any amusing comments I could find on the Internet Archive
GAGE, or Guerilla Anti-Government Enforcer, was my first online release. It attracted a handful of negative comments but was largely ignored. Note the beetlejuice MIDI. My sister commented that the main character looked like Chucky (as in killer doll Chucky) but I was more going for "cool anime guy." I learned quickly after release that Klik community members LOATHED the default platform movement. It was rife with bugs and glitches so custom movements were already the norm. I deleted the upload a few weeks after posting because of the harsh reception. 
The only online mention of GAGE I was able to find.Fortelex Netherworlds - December 2001  Fortelex Netherworlds loaded into The Games Factory's Level Editor. Fortelex Netherworlds was a real time strategy puzzle game in which players used passive income to upgrade sections of their fortress while sending units across a field to attack an opposing fortress. Runes had to be cumbersomely arranged to spawn units. There was a day/night cycle but it didn't do anything but look cool. I had no idea how to code a game like this so it only half functioned. It was directly inspired by Beau Langston's SIEGE!!. 2002's The Elegy. So cinematic! Note the weird Rocky Horror Picture Show joke which almost sort of lands??? The Elegy was a military-tinged (twas right after 9/11 after all) survival-horror zombie game directly inspired by Owen Lindsay's well regarded Bloodbath demo. There's a version out there with actual gameplay but sadly all I could find was this old work-in-progress version. Also I must've deleted this one quickly because the Wayback machine only gives me broken links. Note the Jars of Clay MIDI. I listening to Christian music exlusively at the time. The window title, filename, and readme all display the game name as 'Army Man Bob and Friends' but the fancy in-game title graphic reads 'Army Dude Bob and Friends.' Who the heck knows man. I'm fairly certain that this one was inspired by Hamish McLeod's game Furry. Here's the Army Man/Dude Bob's readme:
The egregious slowdown was caused by particles that spawned partles that spawned particles. I was a particle guy. The little dudes you squish into a bloody mess were the coolest thing about this one. I remember being proud of Hover Wars, but not proud enough to not delete it after its sequel came out two weeks later. Nowadays I'm a digital hoarder and I wish I could ask child me "why do you keep deleting everything dadgummit?!?" "Orden Under Ground" was one of my many fake game studio names. Hover Wars was inspired by the DOS game Operation Carnage by Midnight Synergy. I loved that MIDI and listened to it outside of the game on loop. Oh, also, Left Behind Inc. had nothing to do with the Christian media franchise of the same name. It was a Klik company founded by Caderay who seemed frustrated by the coincidence. Hover Wars II is Hover Wars with better graphics and fewer bugs. The game is nominally wave based but I didn't know how to reliably measure how many enemies remained so the only real objective is to stay alive for 3 minutes until it kicks you to the next level. There are two bosses, also heavily inspired by the ones in Operation Carnage. Hover Wars II also attracted the greatest comment I've ever received on any of my games:  Two years later I'd circle back around and lob a gay slur at this guy. It's still online today. Sorry internet, I was a kid.  The create-games.com download page for Frozen in Time. I kept commenting on my own post because there was no way to edit the information page after submitting it. I haven't been able to track down a copy of Frozen in Time. It was a side-scrolling arcade shooter inspired by Salvador Dali. I tend towards longer, exploration-centric games and this was an intentional departure. It was the most well-received of my early stuff. Mr. Grinman is referenced in the lyrics of the song The Games Factory from New Active Object. Play Mr. Grinman here on Kliktopia. My first game with personality. Players assumed the role of the titular Mr. Grinman, a treasure-swiping thief who would become a reluctant hero by the final level. He had a flamethrower-esque burp attack and the ability to stick to ceilings. The latter ability was me repurposing a notorious default platform movement bug that I didn't know how to fix.  Mr. Grinman was inspired by the grotesque cartoony aesthetic of Wario, Boogerman, and a Klik game called Novabrain's Grand Adventure- so it hurt a little when the first review was a 3/10 by Podunkian, co-creator* of Novabrain's Grand Adventure:  *The other dev was Texmo, Dropsy's lead programmer! That dadgummed default platform movement. I didn't *want* to use it but I was horrendous at math and lacked an understanding of loops and engine fundamentals. Writing my own platform movement was a notch or two too difficult for me; not for lack of trying.  The Clickteam forums were a little less cool. It was a nice kid-gloves place and posters were polite and civil but I wanted the approval of my new peers.  A nice comment! I'd actually go on to hang out with MasterM in real life. He lived close to the city my wife (then fiance) studied in around 2015. Anyway, here's me being sassy:  And of course more default platform movement discourse:   This was mostly a re-upload though I did add three (basically tile-swapped) levels and a new boss. I released an updated version of UCX with new enemies in 2003. It is lost. If anyone has "UCX.zip" laying around hit me up! Uninhabitable Colony X was another SIEGE!! inspired game (see Fortelex Netherworlds above) in which players send units across a field to fend off an enemy onslaught. I borrowed the "send dudes to the mines to make money" mechanic from Bobbyville Gold, a humorous idle game in which you manage a community of slow-witted humanoids, all named Bobby Macpherson. I listed this version a "beta" and asked people to submit bug reports. Here's an archived version of the Beta info page, worth a visit for the silly overserious 'Story' paragraph. I think I was hoping that everyone would go "it's perfect, no notes!"  The game was indeed repetitive, but at the time that was a bridge too far I guess because I blew up at him in the comments:  Things eventually settled down. lmbo at my choice of phrase here:  Joshtek would go on to start the Kliktopia archive and send me his backed up copy of this very game. He's a reason a whole lot of that stuff hasn't been completely lost. In July of 2002 I started planning my first ~legit~ game. I had recently made a new best friend through the Klik community (DarklordJW) and he agreed to help me code the project. I was also an avid scourer of The Mod Archive and found a musician interested in contributing for free. I made a small (now lost) demo for the game before Darklord was conscripted and took screenshots of it (sadly also lost) for this preview on The Daily Click:  It was exciting to actually work with a team. Darklord was an extraordinary coder and my pixel art skills were improving rapidly thanks to Pixelation. This was the big one. It was our Eternal Daughter.  The end bit tickles me because of the implication that everyone would be clamoring to read some 15-year-old's middling 9 page sci-fi backstory. I also posted the idle animation of a boss that was supposed to look like a mecha-sphinx but just looks awkward and somehow 9/11-informed:  There's a slight twist here though: By Post-Apocalyptic I meant Post-Tribulation.  That's right, I had an account on the Christian Coders Forum. Here's the full text of the post. Skip it unless you're interested in how an interest in making games and an interest in end-times theology coalesce in a young mind:
I'd recently started seriously assessing my Christian beliefs and ended up having a more-or-less standard late 90s/early 00s North American charismatic youth group experience. I knew I wanted to make something that honored God. DarklordJW was also a Christian experiencing a similar phase of life and shared a similar aim. It was a cool coincidence. Around that time a touring eschatologist and end-times preacher visited our church. I bought his book and was fascinated that a sequence of events so cosmically exciting was so rarely explored in modern Christian media. Left Behind notwithstanding. I wasn't a fan of Left Behind and found it more boring than heretical, ironically I guess considering my membership in the "Left Behind Inc." Klik collective.  I hope Left Behind Inc. aren't.... left behind. ;)  Can you believe the solid theology we've got going on in here? Gateway is Dark Aftermath continued. We retitled it and started over. My pixel art skills had taken a massive leap and I was jazzed. Darklord cooked up an incredibly cool test engine (with a working whip!) but it never progressed beyond that.  ....and a hype post on the Natomic Studios forum.  The plot wasn't as bad as it sounds in that post though: the 'barbaric alien race' (Clyrians) were actually misunderstood good guys, and little dude below this blurb to the right was going to be your minigun-wielding Clyrian ally.   Both Darklord and I were going through the sort of personal upheaval common to teenagers so we couldn't devote much time to it. My dad's new "No Computer Sunday" mandate also wiped out most of the time I had to work on my projects, though we did try making this one work well into 2004. Fun fact: Darklord ended up going to a bible college 30 minutes away from my dad's house so we were able to hang out in real life from 2006 until 2011. LOUD AUDIO WARNING! My dad was a real-life delivery guy for Zephyrhills Bottled Watter and I made this wave based beat-em-up as a birthday gift for him. Bottled Water Man Bash would be my last proper release before I switched to music as my craft of choice. Here's an excerpt from the readme:
Yes the enemy at the end was inspired by that famous gross shock picture. A zombie platformer! This was released officially as the "Dark Aftermath Beta" because I thought the title was cool and wanted to reuse it. Later I'd rename it "Cyathus" and peck at it glacially until late 2004. Production was halted because of one of those infamous Clickteam EDRT.EXE crashes that I couldn't seem to excise from the project. Here's the cool main menu: |
16-year-old Jay Tholen. 2003. probably around Christmas. probably listening to System of a Down, right on the verge of disocvering Pink Floyd.
2003 marked a move away from games, my attention was divided by a gazillion new influences and microhobbies and teenager things:
i was devoting more time to prayer and reading scripture.
i had massive, stupid crushes on girls resulting in embarrassing schemes to get them to notice me. I'll never write an essay on this.
i was experiencing a life-changing progressive rock phase (Pink Floyd, then Dream Theater, then King Crimson and Genesis, then all the really weird stuff.)
Flash animation! Another new obsession. I was a regular on the Stick Figure Death Theater forum and particularly enjoyed Rob DenBleyker's Joe Zombie series, eventually working on my own never-released series inspired by it.
the Something Awful dot com forums had also completely shifted both my self-image and how I saw my peers. i registered in 2004 and quickly became a massive jerk because i suddenly saw myself as part of a savvy in-group. this was new for me. i felt i was on the bottom rung socially in real life. Something Awful was my biggest influence and time sink back then. (i'll def be writing about this later.)
my game development time was also hampered by No Computer Sunday; a ban mandated by my dad in an attempt to encourage me to occasionally leave my room or do my homework. The result was me skipping tons of class to make up for lost time. at this point the world I cared most about had shifted almost entirely to the internet.
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the thing that finally killed game development for me was a visit to Full Sail University's open house. Full Sail was (is?) a private game development school in Orlando, only ~two hours away from our house. they advertised in PC Gamer magazine constantly, so I'd already developed a passing affinity for it. my parents took me there in the hopes that I'd turn my final year of school around enough to land some sort of small scholarship.
the campus tour was impressive. every discipline was represented and their facilities seemed to be state-of-the-art. the tour ended with an "ask a professor" event at their camus coffee place. visitors could mingle with the staff and eat snacks.
whoever I talked to that night was definitely in the business of smacking down wide-eyed kids with hard industry truths because our conversation was brutal. i explained a little about my experience making smaller games and to him there was no place for that in the industry. in 2004 he may have been right. the shareware era was long dead and the next indie boom wouldn't be for another four or five years.
he was also thinking of how i'd slot into Full Sail because he advised me to either pursue computer science OR game art but not both. he emphasized that going commercial with my pixelly hobby games was a doomed prospect. i cried on the drive home.
i would go on to repeat my final year of high school and drop out before the end on the advice of my guidance counselor. my GPA was too low to pass and it'd make more sense to sign up for adult school and earn my GED (General Education Diploma.)
as far as i thought the game thing was over for me. for the ~8 years i'd stay living with my dad and jump between local telemarketing and grocery store positions. that stretch of time was difficult financially (thanks frickin USED CARS that flippin BREAK ALL THE DANGED TIME) for both me and my dad but that guy is awesome and we had a lot of fun hanging out. plus, doing creative stuff as a hobby with and having no ambition beyond that is freeing. music compositon and production became my new creative pursuit of choice and remains my favorite creative discipline.
many years later the game thing DID end up working out and none of the experience went to waste. THE END!!!!!
BY THE WAY, if you enjoyed this, i wrote a progressive rock / digital fusion concept album about everything you just read. it was crafted using mostly samples from The Games Factory and Klik & Play too! exceptions being the incredible saxophone, flute, clarinet, and guitar performances that pepper the album.
Quick links: New Active Object on Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube (lyrics) | YouTube Music
Jay on Twitter
Jay on Bluesky
Jay's Music on Bandcamp
email Jay:
jay @ jaytholen dot net
