I did something similar and contacted Future Publishing in 1997 for my secondary school work experience. Ended up commuting by train to Bath for a week and working with the editorial team of PC Review. By working they put me in a corner and had me play Little Big Adventure 2. I then also got play and review (with heavy editing) Atomic Bomberman. I still have a print copy of the issue with my name on the review. Twenty three years later and I’ve been making games professionally for fifteen years.
My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.
> My other week was with a flight school at Bristol Airport which was equally fun in a different way. Lots of answering the phone and chatting to adults which as a shy boy was exhilarating and I got to go up with an IFR student in heavy cloud with perhaps the most exciting landing I’ve ever experienced.
This is a little uncanny. In the 6th form I did work experience in flight operations at a firm called FR Aviation, based out of Bournemouth International Airport (may still have been known as Hurn Airport back then). They did a lot of exercises with the Navy so I too got a flight. Mine was in a Falcon, although not the F-16 kind: it was more of a Learjet type thing - just a very small passenger jet with twin engines. Still, my first time in any kind of jet and pretty cool as I got to sit in the jumpseat between the two pilots.
I am however eternally jealous of getting a flight in a small jet.
It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.
I do understand that your parents acted the way they did. As someone who grew up with games, I would have gone the extra mile to support the venture.
But am happy to hear that things worked out after all.
I was hunting for retro games in a charity shop in our old hometown. I didn't notice him come in but we recognised eachother pretty much straight away and had a good chat outside.
He didn't go to work for Bullfrog. In fact neither of us went into the games industry at all. But he did find his way into programming, and had spent a few years before we bumped into eachother doing a lot of fairly close to the metal work in C.
In year 11 we had to organise our own work experience, and I decided I wanted to try to do mine at Bullfrog - this would have been 1991. My friend Chris and I had started fiddling around with building games using STOS and AMOS on the Atari ST and Amiga, and so I asked him if he wanted to try to get in as well.
We talked to our form tutor about it. He was very supportive, got the deputy head involved, and they let us make some phone calls (a big deal for schoolkids at the time) to try to get in touch with Bullfrog. We didn't get anywhere with Electronic Arts, their publisher at the time, who flatly refused to give us Bullfrog's contact details, but then I decided to phone up Amiga Format, explained what we were trying to do, and we ended up speaking to one of their staff writers or editors who gave us Bullfrog's number straight away.
A totally surreal experience then occurred as I rang the number for Bullfrog, asked to speak to Peter Molyneux, somebody gave him the phone and we ended up talking. After explaning to him that Chris and I were looking for work experience, I handed the phone to my form tutor who verified the whole story and, long and the short of it, Peter Molyneux was totally up for us coming on board for a couple of weeks.
Absolutely unbelievable and therefore, in my eyes, regardless of what has happened since, the guy is and will always remain a legend.
Here's where the story gets a little sad though, at least for me.
I hadn't mentioned this scheme to my parents because I thought they'd poo-poo the idea before I'd even started, and I just didn't want to deal with the argument and the discouragement. I thought it would be better to see if we could get anywhere with it, and then talk to them about it if it worked out.
So I did talk to them and, long story short, they wouldn't let me go and stay up in Guildford (I grew up in Dorset). But Chris's parents did let him go, so my final conversation with Peter Molyneux was to thank him very much for the opportunity, apologise that I couldn't come after all, but let him know that Chris was still going to come.
So at least one of us had a great time at Bullfrog, and I think it was probably the coolest piece of work experience anyone in our year group did. For my placement I was instead a teaching assistant in a local middle school, which was still pretty fun, but not as much as working at Bullfrog!
---
EDIT: I've added the below in response to a reply on this comment, but I thought worth including it here as well to round out the story because I don't want to give an unbalanced view of the situation.
This whole idea of work experience at Bullfrog was always a long shot. I grew up poor. So I was disappointed that my folks said no, but there is no way they could have afforded to pay for a couple of weeks' accommodation for me in Guildford (and I obviously didn't have the money). In my heart of hearts, I knew that all along. Really I think I just wanted to see if it could possibly work[0].
It's also worth pointing out that whilst they didn't let me do that - and disagreements between stroppy teenagers and their parents are hardly unique - they did help me in a lot of other ways, and made plenty of sacrifices for my benefit, for which I will always be grateful.
[0] Of course, if I'd really had some hustle about me I'd have taken a more bullish approach to the setback and gone on some sort of fundraising drive.