The Bad - The Unrealized Dream
My friend Brittany and I loved playing Mario Party, though I somehow don’t remember playing it with her. We came up with a plan to have our very own Mario Party themed event. It wasn’t going to involve going around on some board but rather replicate a ton of the mini-games. It was a very detailed and very expensive idea we had going, so we had to start working and saving.
We were 10 at the time, so it wasn’t like we could work at a grocery store or restaurant. We worked for our parents, neighbors, and anyone else in the neighborhood that needed some sort of assistance. We saved any allowance that we received to go towards this event. We also started selling some of our own possessions, lemonade, and baked goods.
After several months, we earned hundreds of dollars. I was the money manager as well as the budget analyzer. It was dumb of me to not do it earlier, but I started to come up with how much the games alone would cost. It was surprisingly staggering. We had planned to do around 40-50 games from the first two Mario Party titles, but we only had enough for maybe 15, if we chose the least expensive ones.
It was very disheartening, but we pressed on. Unfortunately, we had else left to sell that we wanted to get rid of and the weather was starting to get cold outside, making it useless to sell food and drinks. Our parents had run out of things for us to do for money, so we spent weekends raking leaves, shoveling snow, and removing ice for October, November, and early December.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get many opportunities to do those things, so we barely made any money. Because Christmas was just around the corner, Brittany and I had to discuss if we wanted to ask for things to help with the event for Christmas or not. I think we were just exhausted and overwhelmed at this point that 9+ months of work had seen very little progress in the end because we decided to put an end to our Mario Party aspirations. We divided the money up evenly and went on our way. I think we considered starting it back up again in the spring, but it never went past that stage.
Maybe it would have been a complete disaster if we followed through with the Mario Party event in the end, but that’s only speculation at this point. What is certain is that we spent a lot of time and effort to make it happen, but we thought enough was enough at one point.
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