When Nintendo claimed the souls of American children in the late 1980s, concerned parents were quick to point out that video games discouraged creativity. They were wrong about that, as I’m convinced that just about every kid who spent weeks glued to Metroid or Dragon Warrior or The Guardian Legend eventually decided to make his or her very own video game. Most of these ambitious projects lived and died over the course of a single afternoon. Most children scrawled out fevered plans for Nintendo immortality and then threw them away, thus sparing themselves the embarrassment of finding them years later.
I thought I was safe. I thought I’d left behind the obnoxious, Nintendo-obsessed kid I was from 1989 to 1992. I could laugh about it now, because I’d never again have to face the time in my life when I was religiously dedicated to video games. Not just playing them, mind you. I read about them. I wrote about them. I even wanted to make them. And I forgot about my game ideas until my mother found something while cleaning. Something called Quill Quest.
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Remember how just about every American kid had a Nintendo Entertainment System by 1988? Well, I wasn’t one of them. I really wanted one, but my parents didn’t give in until the 1990s arrived. Before that glorious summer day when I saw an NES Action Set on the kitchen table, I had to settle for playing friends’ systems and taking in page after page of Nintendo Power and other magazines. In fact, I spent more time reading about video games than playing them, and that may explain why I tried to make my Quill Quest pitch sound like a particularly hackneyed entry from a volume of How to Win At Nintendo Games.
I didn’t even try to hide my thievery. Why, Quill Quest is like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. 3! But with a porcupine! Buy it anyway! Oh wait, that’s The LENGEND of Zelda, because I was a pretty stupid kid. I really want to say that I was no older than 10, but the text’s references to Super Mario Bros. 3 put its author closer to 11 or 12. Just for the record, I’m sure I came up with this before Sonic the Hedgehog arrived. I really, really liked porcupines, and I was determined to put one in a video game. You’ll also note that I didn’t turn my hero into some cartoonish Warner Bros. castoff with spiked fur and pointy shoes. Quilli’s a realistic porcupine, dammit.
The rest of this page was clearly made up as I went along. A planet named Triplix and a place called the Cybo-Fortress don’t sound like the results of extensive brainstorming, after all. I probably thought that the Razor-Roller was an awesome name for a boss: some huge tanklike monstrosity with razors on its treads and cannon turrets swelling from every metal surface, well beyond what NES graphics could show. I have no idea what Garor-Plex would’ve been. Maybe a giant, demonic cyborg bear’s head that sat in the middle of the screen and spewed lightning at Quilli.
For some reason, I started off by covering the game’s various items, named with the sort of prefixes that only grade-schoolers in 1990 could use with straight faces. Yes, that’s a Mondo Magnet, presumably inspired by Mondo Gecko, the elusive Ninja Turtles figure that every kid wanted. You’ll observe that only the super-burger (because porcupines love hamburgers) has its use denoted. Items like the Ultra-“Sheild” and watch are perhaps self-explanatory to anyone who’s played NES games, but I can’t say what powers the Mega-Orb bestows. I don’t know what the ring does, either, but it only does it three times. It should’ve been a Radical Ring.
I also see that I wasn’t very good at describing the game’s flow. I claim that “on every level you need to collect the following items,” but my table makes it obvious that each stage yields a new and different item. What’s not clear is whether or not the seventh one gives you anything. It’s the last level, but perhaps Quilli would get a special weapon for taking down the RAZOR-ROLLER and GAROR-PLEX. If there was one thing Nintendo Power had taught me, it was to leave a few things for the player to discover.
Nice job, 11-year-old me. You’re already losing the reader with incoherent explanations on the first page, so why don’t you use the second one to add even more awkward rules? You can use these items anytime but only the even-numbered ones except in level five but you can’t save it! No wonder no one picked up that seven-page novel you wrote about Cliffjumper meeting the Starriors, you perfect little moron.
I apparently realized that Quilli would be boring if he were limited to wagging his tail like Raccoon Mario. As shown in the crude drawing of an NES pad, Quilli can also jump, toss fireballs, and perpetuate that myth about porcupines throwing their quills. I once did a school project that debunked this rumor, but I was quite willing to crumple up and discard accuracy for the sake of entertainment.
On to the enemies. I vaguely remember being proud of the Eyepike, though I now realize that it’s just one of the little spiked things from Metroid with the eye of the Technodrome from Ninja Turtles. Rollo, the trapezoidal robot described as a “bomb-chucking baddie” (a phrase I probably lifted straight from Nintendo Power), looks headless, but I believe that dark wedge on its shoulders is supposed to be some eye visor. The Ptero is, of course, a robot pterosaur with goggles, while the Punko really needs no explanation. As for the last enemy here, its name isn’t a misspelling of “snake.” It’s a snark. A sand-dwelling snake-shark.
I assume that the “HP” numbers were my way of keeping track of how many hits each enemy type could take; Quilli’s tail-swipe might knock off one hit point, a thrown quill two, a fireball three, and so on. Nintendo Power did that all the time in their strategy guides.
I also confused “unexpectantly” with “unexpectedly,” but at least I spelled “expectant” right.
And here we are on the first level, rendered like a diagram of a particularly complex plant cell. You’ll even find a new enemy here, showing off my bold "cover it with spikes" design motif. If you’ve played The LENGEND of Zelda, you might notice that the Psychotank is really just the Octorock in a machine guise, but I’m sure it “gaurded” the boss’s room quite nicely. I also decided to change the eyepike’s name to “eyespike.” Much more evocative.
That strange object in the lower-right corner is supposed to be a key, with a map of its location below it. Looking at this now, I realize how unintuitive Quill Quest would have been. The player was apparently supposed to figure out how to throw Quilli into the water and hump a golden rock before getting a key. And that’s not the only secret in the first stage.
Quill Quest rewarded exploration, so this stage hides a giant hamburger and a fireball weapon. I also knew how to string players along with promises of an even larger hamburger in a later stage. How sly of me. As proof of how little I’ve grown up, my advice about “whacking their nozzles” to defeat psychotanks made me snicker even today.
I love Bouncer. Even my younger self thought he looked ridiculous, but his design is everything I wanted in a video-game boss. He has spikes with electricity crackling between them. He has a scissor-like beak and a mouth full of fangs. He has bloodshot robot eyes that bulge. I couldn't wait to show this to my art teacher.
Let’s move on to the second stage, a desert vista that is nothing at all like the second world in Super Mario Bros. 3 or the equally arid second world in Super Mario Bros. 2. After all, neither of those worlds is full of Eyespikes and Snarks.
I’m a little disappointed in the new “enemys” I devised for this stage. The Treadmasters are an interesting concept, but they’re boring to look at. So are the Sanders, so named because they dig into the sand. They are sandy.
Tired of ripping off Zelda, I made the pyramids into brief side-scrolling levels. I sketched them out with new enemies and what must be Metroid-style doors, and then I got lazy and wrote off three of the pyramids as unspecified traps. At least there's an item shop and advice from some boxy little creature. I’m not sure why the advisor tells you to find the key in pyramid 9 when you have to walk past pyramid 9 to actually get this advice, but if I thought everything through I’d have been too busy describing the rich and complicated rivalry between Quilli and Garor-Plex.
The last page makes it plain that I was running out of ideas, as I just created a boss by making a standard enemy larger. To be fair, a lot of actual game designers did the same thing in the NES days, and I was going to play by the rules if I wanted to be a game designer.
This is as far as I ever got in my plans for Quill Quest. I never detailed the uses of the Mondo-Magnet or the schematics for the Razor-Roller, and I have only the vague memory of what the other worlds were like. One would be a water level, I’m sure, followed by a forest and perhaps even a city or some other derivative challenge.
I never returned to Quill Quest, though I was annoyed when Sonic the Hedgehog came along a year or so later. I clearly had the idea before Sega did, and I was robbed. If only I’d turned Quill Quest into an actual game. Just what would it have looked like as a fully realized NES title?
Well, probably nothing like that. This mock-up was created by the artist known as Bratwurst, and it looks a lot better than anything I would’ve made when I was 11. It’s the closest Quill Quest will ever come to being a video game, and I’m comfortable with that. Right now, I’m busy drafting another game. It’s called Last Legacy and it stars a spiky-haired anime hero with a giant sword.
