They Still Ask About “The Purge Camp Crystal Lake”
Yeah, people sometimes still bring that up. “Hey, man, what ever happened with that ‘Purge Camp Crystal Lake’ idea you had? Sounded nuts!” And yeah, it was nuts. And it didn’t quite go how I, or anyone else, figured it would.
You see, the idea was simple on paper, right? Take the annual Purge night, that anything-goes mayhem, and stick it right in Camp Crystal Lake. Jason Voorhees, but now he’s got a government-sanctioned 12 hours to do his thing, and maybe a few other psychos decide to make Crystal Lake their Purge destination. Sounds like a blast, a real easy win for a fan project, maybe a short story or a little game mod.
So, I started sketching it out. First, it was just notes.
- Who would be the main characters? Purgers? Unlucky campers caught out?
- How would Jason react to other killers on his turf? Would he team up? Would he see them as competition?
- What kind of new masks would we see? Purge-themed hockey masks?
I got pretty into it. Spent a few weekends trying to map out a small game level, thinking maybe a simple survival horror thing. I even started looking into some free game engines, you know, the ones that promise you can make a game with no coding. Spoiler: they lie. Or at least, my brain isn’t wired for their “no coding” which felt more like “new, weird coding you have to learn from scratch.” My first attempt involved trying to get a character to just walk across a screen. That took me an entire Saturday. Progress was slow, man, real slow.
Then Real Life Pulled a Fast One
This is where it all went sideways, and not because the project itself was too hard, though it was plenty tricky. Nah, this was pure, unadulterated life getting in the way. I was working this dead-end job at the time, stacking boxes at a warehouse. Mind-numbing stuff, which is probably why I had so much brain space for crazy ideas like “The Purge Camp Crystal Lake.” I’d be dreaming of pathfinding algorithms for Jason while lifting another crate of who-knows-what.
One Tuesday, my supervisor, this guy named Barry who always looked like he’d slept in his clothes, calls me into his tiny office. It smelled like stale coffee and disappointment in there. I’m thinking, “Great, what did I mis-stack now? Did I put the fragile stuff under the heavy stuff again?” But no. He tells me the warehouse is “undergoing a strategic resource alignment.” That’s corporate speak for “you’re fired, but we want to make it sound like we’re smart.” Said my role was being “optimized out of existence.” Optimized! I was the best box stacker they had on the night shift! Okay, maybe not the best, but I showed up most of the time!
So there I was, no job, a half-baked Purge/Jason concept, and rent breathing down my neck. Suddenly, figuring out the AI for Purgers fighting Jason, or how to make a decent blood splatter effect, didn’t seem like a top priority. My “practice” sessions shifted from fiddling with game engine tutorials to endlessly scrolling through job sites, which is its own kind of horror game, let me tell you. The rejection emails alone could fill a novel.
It’s funny how things work out, though, or don’t. Because I had all this free time, albeit totally unwanted, I started looking for any work. Anything to stop my bank account from looking like a crime scene. Ended up taking a temporary gig helping an old dude clean out his attic. The pay was terrible, but it was something. And guess what I found up there, buried under a mountain of dusty blankets? Boxes and boxes of old horror movie VHS tapes and ancient Fangoria magazines. Stuff I hadn’t seen in years. It was like a sign from the universe, but probably just a sign that this guy never threw anything away.
That old guy, his name was Arthur, turned out to be a retired film editor from way back. Super quiet at first, but once I mentioned my stupid “Purge Camp Crystal Lake” idea, he actually perked up. Instead of laughing, he actually thought it was an interesting premise, from a story structure point of view. He didn’t know a thing about game mods, couldn’t care less. But he started asking me about the story, the characters, the pacing. Made me think about it in a completely different way, less about game mechanics and more about, well, a story.
So, “The Purge Camp Crystal Lake” never became a game mod. It never became much of anything concrete, really. I got a new job eventually, something a bit more stable, pays the bills. But I still have those notes, scribbled on the back of old work schedules. And sometimes, when I’m supposed to be working on a spreadsheet, I’ll pull them out. Maybe it’ll be a short story one day. Or maybe it’s just a reminder of that weird period where I was jobless, covered in attic dust, talking horror with an old film editor, and trying to figure out how to make Jason Voorhees share his kill count with a bunch of Purge night maniacs.
The whole experience taught me that sometimes your “practice” isn’t about finishing the thing you started, or even making much headway. Sometimes it’s about what happens while you’re trying, and the weird detours life throws at you. That warehouse job disappearing felt like the end of the world for a bit, but without it, I wouldn’t have met Arthur, and I wouldn’t have spent a few weeks deep-diving into old-school horror instead of just, you know, staring at the ceiling and panicking about bills. Okay, I did plenty of panicking about bills too, but also, the horror deep-dive was a good distraction.
So yeah, “The Purge Camp Crystal Lake.” It’s mostly a story about getting laid off and finding a bunch of old VHS tapes in a dusty attic. Not as exciting as a finished game or a killer short film, but hey, that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes, right? It’s a record of an attempt, and sometimes that’s all you get.
