Mapstalgia

Mapstalgia: video game maps drawn from memory.

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Ultima Exodus, moon gates on world map, by Dave.

Not really created from memory, but I did create this while playing the game back in 1984.  Recently I discovered this while sorting through some old papers.

I never really spent any time with the Ultima series, so this was a quick research project for me to figure out what this was even from.  "Moon Gates", I said to myself.  "I don't remember that one.  I wonder if it's about the moon."

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Resident Evil, first floor, by dungeonsdonuts.

Map from Resident Evil (PS1) drawn from memory. Hopefully posted before Halloween. 

Seriously, I love this game to bits. 

I am so in love with this, yo.  I've mentioned my RE love here before, I'm sure, and I identify pretty strongly with a lot of the more emphatic notes here.

As for "before Halloween", uh, yeah.  For realsies this time, I'm gonna get the stragglers out of the queue.  Sorry about that.

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Riven, world map, by Will.

Hey, long time Mapstalgia. Riven. Oh man, Riven. Intended to be the only Myst sequel before Ubisoft bought the rights and slowly burned them. Criminally overlooked, absolutely brilliant. Some of the best world-building and environmental storytelling ever, fantastic atmosphere, memorable iconography, oppressive dictatorship, world-spanning puzzles, a sense of exploration that still makes me giddy and OMFG RIVEN.

This is the first game I remember looking forward to. I didn't know where to find game news at the time so I was pretty much kept up to date by Fox Trot and my sister. I was young and hadn't beaten Myst but I loved exploring that game and fell in love with Riven immediately. I got the bad ending by mashing buttons and blundered my way around the islands all the way to the side entrance of the gold dome before getting completely stuck, giving up, and leaving it for ~5 years. I also remember stopping and running from the computer at times. Game was creepy as hell.

Long time, indeed!  It got super quiet in the ol' inbox again, and I'm afraid I got so "dare not look" about it that I've let a few things that actually DID straggle in sit for too long.  But let's make that better!  I'll get 'em posted over the next few days.

And, man, one of these days I"d like to have the patience to revisit Riven.  I've talked a little bit about my mixed feelings about Myst, but I always liked the idea of the world building and I would have played Riven if the video stuff in it hadn't consistently crashed my computer during the first couple minutes.  Total non-starter, a real bummer.

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Streets of Rage, Boat Level, by Nathan Windsor.

Less of a map and more of a screenshot, but as it was side-scrolling beat-em-up, there's not much of a map to really draw. I don't remember the first time I played this game, all i know is my older brother used to be a lot better at it than me! I tried to get the city backdrop in and the box thing that changed in every level that you smashed for food, weapons etc. I used to have it on Sega MegaDrive, but now I have it on Xbox360 in the MegaDrive collection, on my phone and also on an emu. It's still fun to play and I still very rarely make it past the "corridor with trolleys" level even when I played it a few weeks ago. 

Oh man, I only knew of these games as "that thing that looks kind of like Final Fight".

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A brief cross-promotional note: when I'm not pestering you for map submissions (*cough*), I've lately been recording a podcast called We Have Such Films To Show You, in which me and my buddy Yakov Grinberg re-watch and discuss in loving, rambling fashion each of the nine (!) Hellraiser films.  You can grab it on iTunes too if you like.  It's a good time, come listen!

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The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Koholint Island, by Ryan Veeder.

A low-res impression of Koholint Island. Link's Awakening was my first Game Boy game and my first Zelda game. The first time I played it, I got stuck in the Mysterious Woods because I was afraid to walk on the cracked floors in one of the caves.

I would have liked to include some more detail, but I figured it was most important to get the eight main dungeon entrances. Some important landmarks (the mermaid statue, the monument to the Flying Rooster, the creepy cave entrance with the tusks) have been lost in between.

You still remember a lot more of it than I do at the moment, and I remember looooving that when I first got it.  Man, that big egg!  The big egg.  I'd forgotten all about it.

Thanks for the submission!

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Metal Gear Solid, first level, by onysk.

The last time I played MGS1 ... Phew, i can't remember, it was on the Gamecube with the remake i think! Well I don't really have something to say but this game is awesome. The gameplay, the story, the characters, everything is awesome in MGS, so I dare you to say it isn't :)

I daren't! I have a strong abiding love for MGS, having played through it for the first time in a sort of tandem hand-off fashion with some friends in college when none of us really knew what we were getting into.  It was glorious and a bit odd.  We ended up plowing through all the VR Missions stuff too just to have more to play.

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Scooby Doo Night of 100 Frights, map, by kaki9.

I don't have much time for video games any more so when I rifled through my brains for game I could attempt to map, this was the one I seemed to remember most. Until I tried to put it on paper of course.

I played this game quite a bit as a kid and, to be honest, I was really bad at it. As you can see, the playground (aka the easy bit) is the most detailed. I only ever got about a third of the way through the game but it and the second hand console we got it with pretty much introduced me to gaming so it's fitting in a way.

Oh man, with Tim Curry doing voiceover work!  Thanks for the submission.

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Duck Tales Remake?

Duck Tales Remake!  Duck Tales Remake.  So that's a thing.

I will acknowledge here that I never spent any real time with the original -- probably five minutes over at a friend's house at one point -- but know it by reputation and know a number of folks for whom it was basically The Best NES Game Ever.

Maybe some of you should draw a little somethin' and send it in to celebrate.  It'll be Duck Week.  End.  Duck Weekend.  I dunno, I'm not super awake yet but go draw a Duck Tales map or something, chop chop.

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Rugrats: The Movie, excerpt, by earthvexing.

So this isn't really a map as such but it's literally all I can remember from this game. It's from Rugrats: The Movie for the GameBoy Color (I think). It was the first game I can remember playing and I did so at a young age, hence my dodgy memory. The only level that stuck in my brain was a kind of mine cart level which I always got stuck on, which is what I drew here.

Thinking back, there might not have even been a mine level but I do remember there being tracks, bats (not pictured :P) and a lot of purple...

Heh.  I love the fractured little slices of memory that people have about these things, and the drawing itself is adorable.  Thanks for the submission!

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The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Hyrule Castle, by Will.

More fun with pixels. LttP had a very memorable opening. Break into the castle in the rain through a secret passageway, find your wounded uncle and take his sword and shield, search the labyrinthine halls for the lower floors where the ground inexplicably gives way to bottomless pits, rescue Zelda from the jailer, and then break out with her through a DIFFERENT secret passageway. Probably the best opening in the series. It just spells out Adventure in fifty foot letters.

PS. The Bird Presidents are awesome.

No, you're awesome.  So suck on that!  

I'm not sure I'm doing complimenting totally right.

But yeah, this is keen, thanks for sending it in.  Makes me want to try and reconstruct some FF1 dungeons now.

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Super Mario 64, Bob-omb Battlefield, by danzgreentea. Being a game that I played a lot when I was younger, Super Mario 64's Bob-omb Battlefield was a level I visited almost as much as I turned my N64 on. I tried to get everything I felt I could fit onto the page (part of the cliff where the Bob-omb King would be is missing, as well as most of the cliff's spiral); there's no coins or very many enemies either. Overall, I felt like it came out okay, especially considering it's been a while since I last played Mario 64.

I still haven't ever spent any real time with Mario 64 -- I skipped the N64 entirely, really -- and I feel like at some point I need to fire up an emu and get to know it a little.  I've really enjoyed the GC and Wii takes on the 3D Mario franchise, it'd be good to do my homework.

And, man, there's just something about a map on notebook paper.  Suddenly I'm 8 years old again.  Thanks for the submission, danzgreentea!

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Doom, E1M1, by richy486.

In my mind the map was pretty much in a straight line, when i looked at the real map afterwards it actually wraps around the outside part

Maps, they'll get you right in the brain that way.  Thanks for the submission!

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Hey, brief self-promotional interlude: one of the things I've been doing lately is drawing US presidents as birds, in a little project I've cleverly titled Bird Presidents.  

It's a continuing series (next up: Mallard Fillmore, but not the terrible newspaper comic version), so head on over to my blog there and check them birds out.

[mapstalgia]

Guitar Hero 3, Through the Fire and the Flames, by jvvi.

This is how I remember it at least. Just a big blur of colors I had no chance of hitting. Not sure if I ever even made it to the end. Great song though.

Man, it's been a while since I've been heroic in a guitar capacity.  I was always able to sort of feel like a badass on Medium and then sort of ease my way into Hard but then I'd run aground on something or other; I don't think I ever got to the point where I was really keeping up with any of the wall-of-notes ones; just couldn't get myself moving that quickly and precisely.

Which matches up pretty well with my experience as a long time musician; I can play a bunch of instruments pretty well indeed but I've never been able to pull of speed-demon stuff.

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The Walking Dead: Episode 1, The Drugstore, by jvvi.

I can still remember this place, back when things still made some sort of sense and weren't too depressing. It introduces you to the two most frustrating characters in the game and Carley, who I like but made me facepalm multiple times. It's also the location of one of the game's most major decisions. It was a good start to a great game.

Oh man, and the battery thing was totally bugged in any case so I got the parts but wasn't allowed to actually find out what happens.  

I've only played the first episode so far, but I was pretty darned pleased with it over all and will pick up the whole run at some point.  Made particularly good living room gaming with a few other folks sitting around to be like OH NO DO X, WAIT Y.

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Reality, my neighborhood, by frognuts.

A map of the neighborhood of my childhood. My house in green. My friends with video games in red, along with the systems they owned. Crappy cul-de-sacs, bullies, and sweet BMX jumps omitted.

Growing up lower-middle class meant knowing which consoles were in the neighborhood. Proper use of this knowledge meant you could effectively multiply your library many times over through borrowing.

(Not exactly a VG map, but it's what came to mind)

Ha!  This is awesome, actually.  I think I may have to do something similar -- I can definitely define my neighborhood and a few other parts of town in terms of where what video games were, since I sort of went through my pre-adolescence in particular on a kind of high alert for video games.

Thanks for the submission, frognuts!