Jay Tholen, whose Hypnospace Outlaw brilliantly captured the feeling of using the internet in the 90s, wrote about making games as a kid back then, including this:

[T]o my mind, making games was a highly technical thing that only large teams of grown-ups could accomplish, so The Games Factory was a reality-bending discovery. I was never not thinking about my next game project. I didn’t want to do anything else. School notebooks were now for mocking up game concepts, enemy beastiaries [sic], and level designs. I took my backpack to restaurants and other family outings and spent any downtime scribbling notes and sketches.

The Games Factory was the successor to Klik & Play, a no-code game development program, and was itself succeeded by Multimedia Fusion, all developed by Clickteam. Jay made a list of notable games that were made with these tools:

• Destruction Carnival (1997) by Charles Tomino
• SIEGE!! (2001) by Fallen Angel Industries (Beau)
• Eternal Daughter (2002) by Blackeye Software
• Entrance Gate (2002) by Jannis Stoppe
• Hell Creatures Rotten Corpse (2003) by Dreams Illusions Fantasies Software
• The Spirit Engine (2003) by Mark Pay
• A Game With a Kitty (2005) by Fallen Angel Industries (origamihero)
• Lyle in Cube Sector (2006) by Bogosoft
• I’m O.K (2006) by “Thompsonsoft” (mostly Derek Yu)
• Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns (2006) by Joakim Sandberg
• Knytt (2006) & Knytt Stories (2007) by Nifflas
• I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (2007) by Kayin
• Bonesaw: The Game (2008) by xerus
• The Spirit Engine 2 (2008) by Mark Pay
• The Sea Will Claim Everything (2013) by Jonas & Verena Kyratzes
• Freedom Planet (2014) by GalaxyTrail
• Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) by Scott Cawthon
• Baba Is You (2019) by Hempuli

These are just games made with Klik software itself. But there’s probably a fairly ambitious story to be written about how the community—which Jay and I were both a part of, but at different times—seeded an entire generation of cool indie game developers that went onto bigger things. (UFO 50 by Derek Yu et al is a triumph.)

(via the always-excellent Virtual Moose blog)