See, you are right and that’s exactly why I started with “This might be a little on the side of the main topic”…

This is a fantastic timeline if you want to go into details.

Well then… To stay true to the history, we probably would have to go back to Galaxian from ‘79, which introduced 1-UPs / additional lives, bonus stages and player upgrades, plus simple summary / statistics for hits and misses.

Well, when I was writing that, after midnight I will add, I had this feeling that Mario was doing this thing earlier but for me Mario stands as an icon for the first level design overall as a golden standard for introduction to mechanics and really efficient use of memory for data, and one of the first uses of dynamic music… So you are totally right, Mario brought a lot of things, I’ve just played Crash much more.

This might be a little on the side of the main topic but there was always something cool about Crash Bandicoot 100 Apples > 1 Life, and you could grind more to make some levels more forgiving, like semi-adjustable difficulty level based on your previous approach… And later on — warp zones, you get to choose from a few options so the progression has variation.

Another thing that comes to mind, not sure if a first game to do it, THPS for unlocking movies and later cheat codes, modes and characters for finishing the career. Plus the whole gap marathon for Private Carrera.

Oh, and chanting from Oddword where it had various uses, for saving friends or for changing into enemies, or using special abilities. This definitely was something, because I still remember thinking as a kid, “how cool is that this one ability has so many different uses”.

Quake III Arena Certified Noob here, we were gaming too, next to you guys.

My brother called this one: „Hijo de Pluto”

With the original they wanted the immersion part to feel like you are actually racing with toy cars and make everyday / mundane surroundings feel unique from this perspective and scale — I guess they still want this to be the main fun factor / appeal.

For me the amazing part was somehow pacing. Every single time I felt like I am starting to cruise through levels, I was knocked down really hard… and my brain exploded more than a few times.

Stunningly, this created one of the best mechanics for me — “if it was too easy, you probably missed a valuable lesson there”.

Arvi created something special, where every bit of that frustration pays off at least tenfold.

Wait… so why is it 69/23 for me?

Well, yes. This exist — I am really grateful for that, but… This audio library now contains 15M positions. It is a big number, no doubt about it.

Then, Spotify has over 80M files in the library with around 4M podcasts.

Estimated existing music amount is unclear but around 90-200M and growing all the time.

And suddenly 15M is getting somehow small in terms of preserving, and this is with music only.

With movies I even remember some interviews with Tarantino and Nolan talking about how badly some movies are being mistreated, lost cuts, not even close to proper/safe long time storing, fires, accidents and so on…

The only thing I would (totally naively and magically) wish for is some kind of really well organized and curated time capsule mainly for movies and music preservation.

I don’t want all the music and movies for myself, I wouldn’t be able to watch/hear it all but I wish for anyone from any time in the future — to have a simple/legal option to just dig anything out, public domain or whatever will work best.

People have created some amazing gems.