Mapstalgia - video game maps drawn from memory

January 10, 2012 10:04 AM

Mapstalgia - video game maps drawn from memory
Mapstalgia is a new blog collecting people's drawn-from-memory maps of video game worlds and levels. Zeldas and Marios; detailed Final Fantasy cartography and sketched Contra recollections; crayon Kings Quest and graph paper Castlevania. Submissions are open, draw something yourself and send it in!

This started abruptly yesterday as a random aside in a Metafilter thread; a few hours later and it was up and running. The initial content is mostly from Metafilter users and Mefightclub folks, though I've also started getting submissions from strangers via tumblr.

This is exactly the sort of everyone-can-contribute, collective-memory modern folk art thing that I love about the internet; I'm hoping the blog will continue to attract remembered maps for a good long while.

Role: creator, curator

posted by cortex (7 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by The Devil Tesla on January 13, 2012: Mapstalgia - video game maps drawn from memory

These are beautiful and really interesting. I'd sent someone a link to a map I was admiring on Tumblr before realising the blog editor and the map submitter (desjardins) were familiar names!
posted by carbide at 2:10 PM on January 10, 2012

I love this idea!
posted by odinsdream at 9:08 AM on January 11, 2012

This is fantastic. Makes me wish I knew the games so I could appreciate it even more.
posted by bluedaisy at 11:55 AM on January 11, 2012

I appreciate the full alternate text for the images. My workplace, for whatever reason, blocks your image hosting service, and while the alt text doesn't get me what I wanted, it still lessons my dissatisfaction.
posted by garlic at 10:27 AM on January 12, 2012

I really like this and was glad to see several Baldur's Gate 2 maps. I sincerely doubt I could come up with accurate maps based on memory alone. Being a geography major with a bad sense of mental mapping has always been a conundrum.
posted by graxe at 1:17 AM on January 15, 2012

Brilliant. Literally LOLed at the Adventure map by samwiseg. So many memories. ("It's a duck! No, you idiot, it's a dragon!")
posted by xedrik at 3:31 PM on January 16, 2012

I overhauled the look of the site this weekend, to bring it into a tighter two-column layout with by-tag navigation down the site. That tumblr's search just literally does not work was news to me; this is the first time I think I've had a blog there where searching was a pretty basic thing folks would actually need to do.

("It's a duck! No, you idiot, it's a dragon!")

So far that's the only post that has the "ducks" tag. May it ever be so.
posted by cortex at 3:44 PM on January 16, 2012