The nostalgia I didn't see coming
I added box art to the map mostly to make it look finished. I did not expect it to knock the wind out of me.
I added the box art for a boring reason. The map looked unfinished with plain dots, so I wired it up to pull every game’s cover, around ten thousand of them, straight from the database. A polish pass. That is all it was supposed to be.
Then I loaded it up, and it knocked the wind out of me.
There is something about seeing the actual covers, the exact art you stared at on a shelf or a rental counter twenty years ago, floating in a sky of the games they connect to. I was not ready for how hard that landed. It stopped being a data project and started being a memory I could fly through.
It gets worse, in the best possible way, when you turn on the screensaver mode and just let it drift. The camera wanders on its own, and it keeps steering toward games I had completely forgotten existed. Not forgotten like a piece of trivia. Forgotten like a smell from a house you used to live in. There it is, glowing, with a line running off to something it quietly shaped.
And that is the part that got me: the lines. You start at a game you loved, and you follow the wire back to the ones that made it possible, the quiet ancestors you never knew it had. That is the whole reason I built this thing, sitting right there. I just did not expect to be the one parked in front of it at midnight, a little misty over a wall of old box art, remembering why I fell for games in the first place.
I built it to do that to other people. I didn’t think it would do it to me.
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