== The Story of Fairydust, Balloon Fight, and Balloon Fever == No story about how my twisted Asperger mind comes up with the idea to do something odd like "Balloon Fever" is complete without a condensed version of the story of my life. Answers the following questions: * What do all of tepples's allegedly bad puns mean? * Why would he ReMix Balloon Fight? 1980-10-01: Damian Yerrick is born a bastard. 1983: I remember watching Sesame Street and running my hand across the screen to pick up the static electricity from the picture tube during the credits. Perhaps this shocked me into learning phonics faster than a child should. Near the end of the year, my mother moved out 1984: Reading newspaper aloud using phonics that I had picked up from Sesame Street. Thank you Big Bird. Then my brother was born. 1985: Care Bears Movie. I listened to the soundtrack LP every single day, along with records by Billy Joel, Billy Squier, Peter Wolf, Madonna, and REO Speedwagon. I watched the Care Bears video so often that I just about memorized the whole thing. 1987: I moved in with a semi-abusive boyfriend of my mother. Eventually everyone involved couldn't take it anymore, and my grandparents adopted me. It was Garfield and Friends on Saturday mornings, and classical music in my shiny new CD player. 1988: Family bought a VCR in late summer, and the first thing we tested on it was a rented copy of The Care Bears Movie. It was just in time for the new TV season, which included The New Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh on Saturday mornings, which I learned about on the back of a Honey Nut Cheerios box, and it was good. I taped it almost religiously from the moment I taught my GPs to use the VCR. 1989: I found the book 'Codes and Secret Writing' by Herbert Zim at the elementary school library. I went to a movie theater and saw Disney's Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, where four preteens became the size of boogers; it displaced Care Bears in my mind and eventually set up an obsession with different sizes of intelligent life. Discovered TNT, Turner Network Television. At first it wasn't the drama haven it is today; rather, it played a wide variety of movies plus a cartoon block in prime time. Bugs Bunny joined Pooh in my VCR. I got a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas, making Pooh backslide in my mind in favor of Mario. It seems that Disney had anticipated this, cutting Pooh from an hour to a half hour and giving me something new to watch in the freed-up time slot: Adventures of the Gummi Bears. I noticed that one of the Gummis' voices sounded exactly like that of Garfield. Then I noticed Lorenzo Music in the credits of both shows. 1990: It hit me that one of the Pooh episodes should have been called "Honey, I Shrunk the Pooh". Early in the year, I discovered The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and followed it as its local syndication hopped from station to station. It later got moved to NBC, sharing a Saturday morning time slot with Captain N the Game Master and getting an upgrade to Super Mario 3. I dreamed of a platform game starring the Pooh characters. I began to learn to program in line-numbered BASIC on the Apple II computers at school. My third grade class took a bus trip to the COSI science museum in Columbus, Ohio, and on the bus I discovered Game Boy, Super Mario Land (with its confusing repetition of game screens that for a moment made me think I was in SMB1 4-4 or 7-4), and Tetris. The addiction to falling blocks began. First I got Tetris for NES, then I got a Game Boy with Tetris. 1991: I too upgraded to Super Mario 3. A mentor in the gifted and talented program showed me a limited programming environment called HyperCard; my grandparents bought me a Mac so that I could work with it. December: Super NES with Super Mario World. 1992: Fifth grade teacher assigned the first chapter of 'The Hobbit' by J.R.R. Tolkien to all students. Half liked it, and half didn't; the ones who didn't (such as myself) read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' by Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens instead. I graduated from Weisser Park School with honors. Over the summer, I borrowed a book from the Library called "HyperCard in a Hurry". It inspired me to create a HyperCard game called Maze Man. I had to make up a code to hide clues in the game, starting with simple substitution ciphers mapping from Latin letters to letters in a new alphabet. In October I got Mario Paint for my birthday, giving me a tool for titling my video tapes. December: Super Mario Kart and the "You're a son of a bitch" lyrics I made up for the battle mode music. 1993: I used AOL for all of five months. I discovered C. K. Ogden's list of 850 Basic English words and started making up the rudiments of actual constructed languages. Then I learned some assembly language to write graphics and sound subroutines for an Apple II BASIC gambling sim called Place Your Bets. 1994: I realized that the word list for Basic English wasn't as minimal as it could be, that it had a lot of cruft for back-compatibility with English. I cut it in half, defining words in terms of other words, and this slightly simplified the conlang effort. And I ported the first two levels of Maze Man to the Apple II. I rediscovered Tolkien through an accident in a birthday present from a Nintendo-loving neighbor, an overhead adventure game maker program for Apple IIGS that included a predefined character named Frodo. After realizing that Frodo was a hobbit and then having a nightmare involving Pooh and some bad minimal-pair jokes, I let LotR displace Pooh. I read 'The Hobbit' and liked it this time, progressing to 'The Lord of the Rings' and discovering that conlang was more widespread than I had thought. My brother got a Game Gear, and I got some rings playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2. As I became more proficient in 6502 assembly language, I thought of writing my own games from the ground up in asm. Garfield's fairy godmother named Esmeralda showed up in two episodes of the Garfield and Friends series. The way she moved turned me on to an extent, and boom! The idea for a simplistic asm game for Apple II entered my head, a cross between a platformer and a horizontal shooter where the player controlled a fairy that could shoot stars out of a wand to kill floating orange balls. This was Fairydust. 1995: I tried to work my way through 'The Lord of the Rings' and got lost near the beginning of volume 2 (The Two Towers). I rented LotR for Super NES and UGH what a bad game. I got NBA Jam TE instead in June after making it out of eighth grade in one piece. I dreamed of a Sonic clone starring the hobbits (get it? rings?), as well as "Son of a Bitch Racing" (a Mario Kart clone), "Smart Ass Hoops" (an NBA Jam clone), and "Lui Fighter" (which would foreshadow Super Smash Bros.). All were to be coded in assembly language on the Apple IIGS; how hard it was to make a scrolling engine work with limited fillrate wasn't apparent to me at the time, as I just saw "Apple IIGS" and "Super NES" and "both use a 65c816 CPU" and didn't think about video architectures. And then I graduated from Memorial Park Middle School with honors. 1996: The infamous Weebles Thanksgiving. I found a Weebles brand toy figure with a molded plastic body and rounded weighted base to make it wobble but not fall down. Another toy had a picture of a similar character, a boy with a rounded bottom instead of legs and waving hello. It hit my brain's pity center, and I wondered what it would be like for a whole race of such people with no legs. Then I compiled a list of every fictional race of intelligent life, large and small, that I could find in LotR and other popular fantasy, and "Son of a Bitch Racing" became "Race Race" (another bad pun). I got an N64 with Super Mario 64 for Christmas. 1997: The infamous "Kinopio preview" of Mario Kart 64 in Nintendo Power. In Japan, Toad the mushroom retainer is named Kinopio, which almost sounds like Pinocchio, and screenshots and an interview use that name. Then I bought Mario Kart 64, and it had changed back to Toad. On a whim, I rented Disney's Pinocchio for Super NES. Connecting the N64 to a video frame grabber led to a mock-up of Mario Kart 64's player select screen to put Pinocchio and friends where I felt they belonged. It was around this time that I began to realize how much Disney changed the classic stories that its animated movies were based on, mostly for the worse. I'd go on to buy VHS copies of several different film adaptations of Carlo Collodi's 'The Adventures of Pinocchio'. I learned the C programming language and the math behind Super NES Mode 7 graphics (F-Zero/Mario Kart floors) on a Macintosh computer, and I came to understand the basic math behind raycasting (Wolf3d/Doom rendering). Then I finally made my first tetris clone on a TI-83 calculator, which math classes started to require; it was the first game I ever finished. I learned QBasic on a school PC by translating my Tetris clone, and then I bought an old 486 PC to play with QBasic and cloned a few other falling block games. I started buying puzzle games just to learn how to clone them, which continues to this day. 1998: Started by finally getting the hang of walking without using my legs, swinging my body between my arms, as one would expect for the race of Weebles. I tried to buy a PlayStation for Super Puzzle Fighter II, but SPF2 was out of stock everywhere so I got Parappa the Rapper, which could be the first modern rhythm game. I loved it. But after two hard drive failures, I started using my Mac less and less. I got a C compiler for PC and translated the QBasic tetris clone. Then I learned to program 320x200 pixel graphics with custom libraries in 16-bit code, made a tile engine, and built a clone of the SameGame from TI-83 around it. It was then that I discovered Joust for NES and XEvil for PC, which put together had much of the feel that I was planning to put into Fairydust. I found a MIDI editor and made a couple contributions to vgmusic.com. I finally gained Internet access, and after a search on the primitive Internet search engines of the time (such as Yahoo Directory and Webcrawler) invalidated many of my choices for a brand name, I settled on Pin Eight (only Spanish speaking fans of an Italian puppet character should get the joke). At the time, I was spending only about 10 hours a month online. Noddy, the other little wooden boy from Britain, came to North American TV, and I started taping episodes. (Why? Go to http://www.wtvi.org/games.asp and tell me with a straight face that the character doesn't look like it could be Pinocchio.) Book report on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The word "fellow" is cuter than "man" or "person"; noted for conlang. Got a digital camera for Christmas and used it as a ghetto scanner to import pictures of imitation precious moments (I seem to remember that the brand was "bonnets and blessings") into my computer. I still don't know why I was attracted to them, but I do remember a phrase: "is it possible to be too cute?" 1999: For twelfth grade English, I critically read 'The Adventures of Pinocchio' by Carlo Collodi, 'The Time Machine' by H. G. Wells, and 'Gulliver's Travels' by Jonathan Swift. (The last of the three hooked into Race Race somewhat.) I got a rude awakening about copyright law when a British media company sent me a nasty letter ordering me to take down a fan page I made about a certain Pinocchio-like character that I'd rather not name here. Then I learned about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and all other sorts of Disney-sponsored badness, along with the fact that an individual typically can't afford a legal defense, even if the act was a fair use. I started work on Fairydust for PC, using ideas that I had synthesized from XEvil and thinking I was the first to make a side-scrolling platformer with Joust style controls. I soon abandoned it when other things became more pressing and more rewarding, namely NESticle and DJGPP. The DJGPP 32-bit C compiler and the Allegro library made my games' graphics and sound issues simpler. The DOSArena project began, and by May I had some playable puzzle games for PC to put on my web site. I graduated from South Side High School with honors. That summer, I was out scooting around like a legless person. A few pre-teens walked in my way. Because of how my costume looked at the time, they couldn't see my knees and were fooled into thinking I was naturally legless, and they followed me to my house. Then I amazed them by changing out of my legless costume into cookie-cutter American clothes. I had some friends for a couple months, until I had to leave for school. At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, I discovered broadband, Usenet, and Google, and I began to post regularly to Slashdot and the alt.aol-sucks newsgroup while playing around with Red Hat Linux. And I found that conlang was even more widespread than I could ever have imagined. 2000: Ditched NESticle for the more accurate LoopyNES (under DOS) and NESten (under Windows). Discovered NerdTracker II (a sequencer targeting the NES sound hardware) and Modplug Tracker (a more traditional MOD sequencer) and started making tunes that didn't sound like Generic, erm, General MIDI. By March, I was pulling a successful sockpuppet act on alt.aol-sucks, as "Damian Yerrick", "pin0cchio", and "Milo Holloway", all with slightly different viewpoints. I dabbled in a bit of NES programming, which I seemed to pick up easily because though the video is completely different, the NES uses the same 6502 processor as the Apple II. I came upon the short story "Knock on Wood" by Frank Thomas Smith while searching for Pinocchio plus some other keyword on Google. Hampsterdance fever gripped the world, and during a week off I wrote a dumb little PC game called Hampsterdeath. I joined Everything2.com, starting with my first post in First Post. I discovered the Precious Moments art by Sam Butcher and realized how it could tie into The Time Machine, with Precious Moments being the Eloi and some other race out of one of the storybooks being the Morlocks. It became obvious to me why Precious Moments drawings and figurines are most often of children: it has become normal for the Eloi to live in what amount to big orphanages because the Morlocks (lemur-like people who live underground) periodically take away and eat the parents. An incident with somebody by the name of Ripp Rider, who was harassing me on what was then my AIM account and whom my friends were calling a pedophile, prompted me to create my new AIM nick "PinocchioPoppins" based on the name of a character from "Knock on Wood". Over the summer, I developed Gnome vs. KDE for NES, a clone of Panel Action Bingo, and Tetanus On Drugs for PC, an application of Mode 7 to Tetris. In July, I moved my web site to pineight.com where it is today. And the Fairydust idea still cooked in the back of my mind. 2001: Josh Kearney finally ditched the Ripp Rider persona. Lorenzo Music passed away. I bought a video capture card and some VHS titles to try it on, one being Mary Poppins and another being The Care Bears Movie. Was it just nostalgia, or was it because the Kristen font used for the front cover resembled the Precious Moments corporate font? Anyway, the video capture thing was a bust. I got a GBA and began to learned to program for it too; game programming for the NES and the PC kind of fell by the wayside. Then the terrorist attacks of September 11 got me wondering what kind of anti-liberty legislation Congress could sneak through, and it was the Patriot Act. I returned to Fairydust off and on, which by then had incorporated some of the setting I had been planning for Race Race. 2002: Realized that Care Bears starts in an orphanage, and the children have simplified facial features and teardrop-shaped eyes like PM people (but not the PM people's SD proportions); were they the missing link between 20th century people and 8028th century people? I began to transition from the nick 'yerricde' (assigned to me by my school) to 'tepples' (which I randomly generated using a Scheme program that I had written after investigating kididdles.com). And then I discovered Toki Pona, an even smaller conlang that initially seemed to fit Wells's description of the language of the Eloi better than what I had been envisioning. From there I tried to learn Esperanto but quit. After I had finished a preliminary port of Tetanus On Drugs to the GBA, I earned a CompTIA A+ certification and soon happened upon the ROM of a Japanese Famicom (== NES) game called Hello Kitty World, a side scrolling platform game with some of the Joust elements that I had been planning on putting into Fairydust. Turns out it was based on Balloon Fight, Nintendo's clone of Joust. It was so much fun I decided to scrap Fairydust, which would just have been redundant at that point. 2003: I discovered Dance Dance Revolution and StepMania at college. I found it rather easy to move my Parappa skills down to my feet, advancing to 4 foot songs on Konamix on RedOctane Ignition pads on the first day. A couple months later I wowed my DDR friends with my first three StepMania simfiles: P8Demo (not publicly released), Bowser Battle, and Chic n Stu. And then I graduated, never to see my friends again. Right after I graduated, I composed my thoughts about the Disney company, which had been brewing over time as I uncovered more and more corruption, into LosingNemo.com, which made it easier to evangelize against Disney. To compensate for the lack of interest in my simfiles after I graduated, I competed in DDREI.com's Tournamix 4, and my simfile for "Around The World" by Red Hot Chili Peppers made it to the finals and 26th place overall out of 175. I found Bemanistyle.com and put my simfiles in the 4.0 and (after the wipe) 5.0 databases; people overwhelmingly liked them. Later in the year, I finally bought something on eBay (actually half.com by eBay, as I wasn't yet ready for bidding wars): Balloon Kid for Game Boy, the North American version of Hello Kitty World. 2004: The infamous Bemanistyle 6 wipe. No simfiles for you, except through a slow site hosted on my own computer through my own cable modem connection. Then I saw previews for Garfield the Movie. Bill Murray, the orange cat's new voice actor, didn't sound anything like the Garfield I remember. Finally after 3 months, Bemanistyle 6 brought back the sims database. I didn't bother re-uploading my sims because Tournamix 5 was going on, and I was too busy pimping "Monkey." by George Michael on DDREI.com. (It didn't do as well as Around The World did.) Later, when DDR Extreme came out on the U.S. PS2, DDREI.com introduced a word filter that changed (among other things) the word "gay" to "balloon fever", and k//eternal said that the official steps for Maximizer, one of the new songs in DDR Extreme, "aren't offbeat, they're just balloon fever." I didn't know about the censor at the time, so I took it the wrong way, thinking that either "balloon fever" was a DDR term that I had never heard before (in the vein of "Beatmania syndrome" or "karaoke steps") or they had something to do with balloons or Balloon Fight. So one night I got the idea to make a remix of the Balloon Fight theme in the style of Maximizer, and the next day, most of Balloon Fever was put together in Modplug Tracker. Then I bought Balloon Fight for NES on the real eBay, partly to play it as intended on real NES hardware and partly so that I could claim that I've always owned a genuine copy of every song I've entered into Tournamix. Then a DDREI.com admin quietly removed the "gay -> balloon fever" censor, possibly confusing many of those just came to DDREI.com and don't get the inside joke. So far, I have omitted Super Mario RPG, Fraggle Rock, and god knows what else.