The good news was there were very few preconceived notions back then about what a game was supposed to be. The bad news was there were no tried-and-true conventions, either. I could put in anything I wanted, but that also meant I was responsible at every turn for what to leave out, and there were exponentially more ways to fail. It was like trying to create a recipe without any knowledge of what ingredients taste good together. With no standard expectations to guide me, I might accidentally end up with the gaming equivalent of breakfast cereal with onions. All I could do was keep asking
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