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Would this be interesting to you...?

6 years ago603 words

I've spent the last few days writing a long, long post where I go over my old art, music, and games, originally as an attempt to explain why I won't be making MARDEK IV, but I've been getting carried away. I'm wondering if it would be of any interest to anyone.

People still occasionally pester me to make MARDEK IV, and I've been meaning to write a post for ages explaining why that's probably not going to happen. But to explain that properly requires (in my mind at least) explaining why I made the first three, and why what I've been doing since then hasn't been a sequel.

The gist of the post was going to be something like "because my creative work has changed a lot since then, as have I as a person; also I've been going through a tough time and working on MARDEK IV wouldn't be worth the investment".

But as I got more into trying to make the explanation sufficiently thorough, I found myself wanting to talk about and include some of my old art, music, and games, and some of my newer work to show how much my creative approach has changed.

I've made a lot of stuff over the years though, so it'd be unreasonable to cover all of it. But I've been covering more of it than I originally intended to, getting carried away, including a bunch of old art and compositions from as early as 2004. I've been playing through all the old games I've made, including comments and screenshots about my thoughts on them - I've just spent seven hours on Deliverance over the last couple of days - and while it's interesting to me, the post is turning out to contain thousands of words, loads of images, probably hours of old music, and, well, it feels like it might be a bit much.

I'm including things that I might not have released before - or which I never released widely - such as plans for where MARDEK might have gone after the third chapter. I know at least some people would be interested in that, but I've also been rambling about early versions of Deliverance and Raider and Timid Cervid and all these other things that most people might not care about.

But maybe it'd be interesting even if it was long, and not all familiar? I once spent hours reading ∞ this thing ∞, about the minutiae of translating Final Fantasy IV for the SNES, despite having only a mild nostalgic interest in that game, just because it was interesting to see the thought process behind it. And of course sites like ∞ The Cutting Room Floor ∞ exist, where loads of tiny details that weren't even included in games are documented. That must be interesting to someone. I know I've spent time reading pages on there, even pages on games I've not played and have no sentimental interest in.

I feel like I'm making no forward process by spending literally days writing a post about my past, but already I feel like I'm finding peace with some old demons by revisiting parts of my creative life I'd tried for a long time to mentally distance myself from, and some of the things I've been looking at are even inspiring me. And it is something I've been wanting to do for ages, so maybe it's worth it?

But would you be interested in reading a long, long post about all the creative work I've done in the last 15 years?