A game called DOS

As detailed in today's Software Notebook, one of the highlights of this weekend's Penny Arcade Expo was the Saturday morning "Pitch Your Game Idea" session, featuring representatives of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo listening to proposals from game enthusiasts in the crowd. Pictured at right is Dustin Davis, 29, of Austin, Texas, who wowed the crowd last year with a game concept he called "Robot vs. Ninja vs. Pirate vs. Monkey." This year, as you can tell from the photo, he proposed a game that would be called "Koalas of Perilous Rage." It didn't go over nearly as well as last year's pitch, but Dustin seemed to take it in stride.

Apart from that, there were several funny concepts that didn't make it into this morning's story. For example, Kevin Pereira, host of G4TV's "Attack of the Show," had the crowd laughing with his concept for a game called "Cable Television Darling" -- starring himself in a title role. Competitors would play hosts trying to make it to the top of the cable television world, juggling the competing demands of the job and adoring fans.

Then there was Matt Friedman, 31, of Virginia Beach, Va., who rattled off a series of proposed game concepts. One in particular was a crowd favorite: "This one is only on the desktop, it's not a console game. It's called Disk Operating System. You actually use your keyboard to type in commands," he said, explaining that the idea is to move files from one place to another. The great thing is that it only requires 640k of memory, which, of course, is all the memory anyone will ever need. (See this recent story on that topic, by the way.)

However, Friedman concluded, "it's only available for the Mac."