It started with a music map I couldn't stop clicking

There’s a website out there that maps musical influence as a graph. Bands are dots. Lines connect who influenced who. You click on one band you like, follow the lines back, and twenty minutes later you’re five hops deep in a corner of music you’d never have found on your own. It’s a simple little thing. I could not stop clicking it.

That was the whole spark. Not a dataset, not a piece of tech, not a business plan. Just the feeling of pulling on one thread and watching a whole web come with it. And the thought that wouldn’t leave me alone: games have that exact same hidden wiring, and nobody had built the thing that lets you crawl around inside it.

Music is tidy. Games are a mess.

Music graphs work because the data behaves. Musicians name their influences in interviews. Critics argue the lineage out loud. By the time you go to draw the map, most of the connections are already written down somewhere and mostly agreed on.

Games don’t do you that favor. A game might take its combat from one place, its art from another, and the way its levels are built from a third, and the people who made it never sat down and listed any of it. Some connections are obvious if you know the medium (just about every immersive sim leads back to Ultima Underworld). Plenty more are invisible unless you’ve spent years staring at this stuff.

But that mess is the good part. Games don’t just influence each other. They share studios, engines, publishers, the same people. Teams blow up and reform somewhere else. A mod quietly grows into its own game. Two rivals shove each other forward for a decade. “Influenced by” is one wire out of many, and I wanted all of them.

So that’s what I went after: not just who inspired who, but the whole tangle. Twenty-eight kinds of connection, in the end. Fifteen I draw by hand because they tell a story, and thirteen the machine works out on its own from the data. Fifty-some years of games, wired up like a conspiracy board.

Two dimensions wasn’t enough rope

The music sites are flat. Dots on a page. That’s fine for a few hundred bands. My first version was flat too, and it worked great right up until it didn’t. A hundred games, lovely. Add a few thousand more and all those connection types, and the whole thing collapses into a hairball. You can’t read it. Everything sits on top of everything.

Going 3D wasn’t me showing off. It was survival. Give the layout a third direction to spread into and the clumps that used to pile on top of each other finally have somewhere to go. Genres drift off into their own neighborhoods. It stops looking like a diagram you read and starts looking like a place you can move around in.

And once it was 3D, the name showed up on its own. Zoom out and the games look like stars. The clusters look like constellations. The busy parts glow. I went looking for a database and accidentally built a star map.

The moments that made me finish it

Three things kept me going when I wanted to quit.

First was watching the clusters form by themselves. I never told the thing that RPGs belong together, or that the old shooters should huddle up away from the modern ones. The connections did that. You let the physics run and the structure just falls out of the data. The first time I saw that happen, I knew the idea actually worked.

Second was the timeline. Drag a slider from the seventies to now and watch the galaxy fill in, year by year. Stop on any year and the shape of the map tells you what the industry looked like then. 1993 does not look like 2003 does not look like 2023. You can see it grow up.

Third, honestly, was the screensaver. Let the timeline play on its own, let the camera drift through, and old box art you grew up with floats past like points of light. That one isn’t useful. It just got me right in the chest, and that was enough.

The part I still haven’t solved

Here’s the thing that humbles me every time. The second a game developer opens this, they search for a game they worked on. Every single one. Big studio, two-person basement operation, doesn’t matter. They want to find themselves on the map.

And when they’re not there, you watch their face fall. That little letdown is the hardest problem in the whole project, and it’s pointing at something real. The first batch of connections came from what the database hands you: same studio, same publisher, same genre. Useful. But it misses the thing that matters most to the people who actually make games, which is the team. The humans.

Games get made by groups, not by “the director.” People carry what they learned at the last job to the next one. That’s the real DNA. Figuring out how to show that without turning the whole thing into an industry org chart is the hardest open question I’ve got, and it’s also the most important one. I don’t have it licked yet. I’m telling you that on purpose.

Why “six degrees”

The name’s a nod to that old party trick about everyone being six handshakes apart. Turns out games do the same thing. Pick any two, no matter how far apart they feel, and there’s almost always a chain of connections between them that’s shorter than you’d guess. Usually under six hops. The whole site is built to let you find that chain.

It started as a weekend experiment squeezed in around a day job at a game studio. Load some games, draw some lines, see if it felt like anything. It did. Everything after that, the real data, the timeline, all of it, came from one feature asking the next question.

Open Six Degrees of Play on the live site ↗