This is the fourth part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood.

I have been writing and drawing and telling stories for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I was a wee little lass, I was writing stories in spiral bound notebooks, stapling together my own comic books and could memorize and recite entire films by heart. Telling stories is the only thing I can do, hence why it became my lifes work. So by that measure, it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that applications like Kidpix were high up on my list when I first started using a computer, but none of that stuff ever came remotely close to holding a candle to the all time greatest story making program I can recall, Orly's Draw-A-Story.

Bundled together with a handful of other games, given to me by the very same woman who bought me my first PC - who I mentioned in a previous article - Orly's was the one that stood out the most. Despite, sadly, not being a small Jamaican girl, I was still able to connect to the characters within the game, but especially the creativity Orly seemed to have and the overall concept of the game itself. In fact, I almost hesitate to even call Orly a "game", because it's more along the lines of something like a tool, like Photoshop, but much more fun and involved.

The whole premise is extremely simple; you're given the task of helping Orly create 4 different stories, each with a different theme and each needing artwork and text. Easy as that. But there's also the option to simply work on your own projects, and that's where, in my opinion, the game really shone and that's what I became obsessed with. Now, instead of simply opening up a word processor and writing my stories by my lonesome, I had little digital friends to work with, and that made the process all the less lonely, and all the more engaging. Plus with the ability to add artwork - another aspect of creativity I love - directly into the story itself, it was a no brainer that I'd prefer this over something bland like Word.

The level of interactivity works in its favor, especially for a child, because you aren't just telling a story. You're helping someone else tell a story, and they're all giving you feedback as you do it, thusly making you feel like you're doing a good job. Kids - or perhaps it was just me because I was surrounded by adults who didn't care about me one iota - crave constant validation, especially for their creative work, so who better to supply said validation than two disembodied Jamaican heads and a frog? And while I guarantee none of the things I made during my tenure with Orly were of any note or even worth being saved for the sake of posterity, it was nice to know that, once again, video games had my back in terms of giving me what I needed most when I needed it.

Because listen, there's two things in this world I know how to do fairly well: press buttons to play video games, and tell a story. I am confident enough within my skills on those two things to say that I can do them competently and not feel as if I'm overstepping my ego. So when the two collide, which they often do these days, it makes me all the happier. In fact, not only have games in general become more story based as the years have gone on, but there's even entire genres of games now like Virtual Novels which are essentially interactive books that I've played a hell of in the last decade. But I think Orly might have really been a first of its kind, in a way, in combining the two and meshing them so well together to create a wholesome and unique experience.

These days, I devour 700 page novels in 2 months at best and I just 100k words in my own latest novel I've spent the last year working on, and I think a lot of that is because of having played Orly as a little girl. See, I also had a problem in elementary school early on where I couldn't read. As a side effect of my autism, my development was slower than other kids, and so I didn't know how to read very well until 3rd grade at the earliest. But because I had something like Orly to fall back on, to help keep me interested in the novel idea (not to be cute) of literature, I never lost the interest, and by middle school I was reading 1k page books in a week or so.

Games, even the ones you least expect, have a myriad of impacts on us in ways we could never have imagined. Who would've thought as a little dorky redheaded girl playing something like Orly, that I would one day go on to be a (self) published author? I certainly never would've.

Because while my parents rarely complimented my achievements, perhaps because they weren't the sort of achievements they would've liked to have seen me accomplish in the first place, I always had trouble believing in myself and my abilities. But you know who never did? A little Jamaican girl named Orly, who always needed my help, and was always grateful to have it, and tell me I did a fantastic job, mon. With its bright colors, its cheery attitude and its fantastic little soundtrack, Orly made me believe that with just the right amount of effort, and the right kind of support, I could make the things that I wanted to make, and those things would help me thusly make sense of the world around me.

I think it just goes to show that inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.