Is there such an online forum or a web site...

[idontknow]

...where you can talk to or give advance to people who make games & actually give them ideas as to what to put into the games?

For example, suppose i have an idea for a new mario game & i want the makers of "Mario Party" to know about it. How could i go about contacting them?

[Archibaldo]

Advance? I think you mean advice. I don't think that there is an actual site about that sort of thing. Maybe you should contact Nintendo or something.

[Eckels]

sure you could probably call them up at home and piss them off because you want to tell them how to do their jobs.

[skidphyzz]

There isn't one time I sent in a game idea to capcom with character drawings, and bios plots and sketches and they sent it back (not that I really had my hopes up) and said that they and no other company they know of accepts Ideas for games due to possible lawsuits. Even though I wrote in the letter I do not wish to have any credit or reimbersement if the game was made/accepted. I also have created a few board games and tried sending them into milton bradley/parker brothers and others, I guess you just have to know someone on the inside if you want to develop your own game.

[King]

Maybe you could try writing a petition? If you get enough people to sign it and send it to the company, maybe they'll take your suggestion seriously. They're counting on you to buy their games, right?

[AtmaWeapon]

Actually sending the company your idea is kind of counter-productive. If they use your idea, then they are using your intellectual property, which you have a right to. Anything you send to the company is valid evidence in court that you came up with the idea, so this is a big deterrent to the company.

Also, for every good game idea, there's probably more than a million people with stupid ideas for games out there. The game companies have people working for them that make pretty good game ideas, they see no reason to take outside ideas.

Your only real choice is to post your idea at a lot of programming-type or gaming-type forums and maybe a programmer-type will like it and make it a reality.

[biggiy05]

Id just like to add what i think on this subject. I do think that some of the smarter game programmers read gaming magazines and visit forums under a guest just to see what ppl like or dislike about the game. There are ways to get your ideas to them you just have to search for ways to get it to them.

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

Petitions don't always work so well either, especially these fancy pants modern online ones. People can sign them a dozen different times under different names without fear of penalty.

However, having a relatively large one (5000+) does send a small message. Like the petition over at one of classicgaming.com's fan sites did. A petition to have Super Mario RPG released on the GBA. Nintendo took notice and sent a nice reply, but so far nothing else has been said. Who knows if it actually changed anything?

To pitch a game to a company, you need to be serious. Capcom won't be taking ideas from teenagers with good drawing skills. If you're going to get an idea accepted, you need to somehow get an audience with someone high up, and have some credentials to back yourself up. Then maybe, just maybe, they might consider it, after some legal junk is taken care of. But I wouldn't go trying unless you had some experience designing games to show them, such as working for an actual company that made games, or at least some pretty nice stuff you did on your own time.

[King Link]

If you have an idea for a game (so long as it does not infringe on any copyrights) why not create the game yourself? That's what I plan on doing in the future.

[Archibaldo]

The only problem with making up a game and sending it to Nintendo or something, no doubt that some one has had the same idea as you and has already sent it in . It's happened to me before only I didn't get a chance to send it in. Some 20 kids beat me to the idea.

[Flash Man]

GameDev (http://www.gamedev.net/)
Post it there. Someone might help. If they do help they will either end up doing it completely wrong, never respond back or start it and stop it. DO IT YOURSELF

[Michael Moore]

sure you could probably call them up at home and piss them off because you want to tell them how to do their jobs.

Somebody should, God knows most of them fuck up the games their making anyways.

[MottZilla]

GameDev (http://www.gamedev.net/)
Post it there. Someone might help. If they do help they will either end up doing it completely wrong, never respond back or start it and stop it. DO IT YOURSELF

As FlashMan said, if you really want your game idea done, do it yourself. The fact is if you are capable of making it yourself, nothing is stopping you then. Or, you could perhaps go a step further and actually get it released by a major game company, but ofcourse if you are using someone else's property (characters or whatever) you would have to get them on board if you ever planned to sell it.

Anyways, there are more than likely thousands of emails that they get with the same old ideas and they just hit that nice delete key. It's not that your idea was nessisarily bad or was gotten before, but do you really expect a company to take 1 little email idea and make that into a game? It'd have to be one hell of an idea.