The nostalgia I didn't see coming
I added box art to the map mostly to make it look finished. The nostalgia hit way harder than I was expecting.
I added the box art for a boring reason. The map looked unfinished with plain dots on it, so I wired it up to pull every game’s cover, around ten thousand of them, straight from the database. Each entry points at its own cover, so it was mostly plumbing. A polish pass.
Then I loaded it up and the nostalgia hit hard. That part I was not expecting at all.
It is the actual covers doing it. The exact art you stared at on a shelf or a rental counter twenty years ago, floating in a sky with the games it connects to. I don’t have a good explanation for why that lands so much harder than a label with the same name on it, but it does, and it does it every time.
Screensaver mode made it worse. The camera wanders on its own, and it keeps steering toward games I had completely forgotten existed. Not trivia-forgotten. Gone entirely, until one is right there glowing in front of me.
Then you follow a line off one of those and land on the games that influenced your favorite, and that is where the whole thing came together for me. That is why I wanted to make it in the first place. I was thinking about other people when I built it. It didn’t occur to me that I would be the one parked in front of it at midnight.
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