This is a the first in a new series of gallery blog posts showcasing how a particular object or theme was shown in the many PC games I’ve completed.
A few years ago, I was dumb enough to embark on a new project which I called game tropes. I’ve always taken a lot of screenshots of the hundreds of PC games I’ve played the past couple of decades, and the goal was to go through these thousands of screenshots and sort them into categories. It could be anything. Bridges, goblins, fountains, floating rocks, keyholes, tents – the sky was the limit.
I’ve always been incredibly disciplined and stubborn when it comes to finishing really big and monotonous projects, but this time I had really bitten off more than I could chew. Since I had folders with sometimes more than a hundred screenshots for more than 500 PC games, the amount of work multiplied into truly astronomically big proportions.
Still, I kept at it for many months collecting and sorting screenshots in various folders before finally burning out. Then I set the project aside for some years only to take another look at it again. Why did I abandon this project? It was such as good idea! And yet again, I started collecting and sorting even more screenshots before burning out for the second time. And again the project just collected dust for years.
I’ve always wondered how it would feel like being Sisyphus. Now I knew.
But I still think the original idea is really good, so I’ve decided I’m going to start publishing gallery blog posts with the material I managed to collect before giving up. There is still a ton of screenshots to be shared, and there’s a lot of good stuff there.
The benefit from publishing these galleries is twofold. First, it could be interesting for game designers to have a look at how various game developers showed a certain type of object in older games. It could serve as inspiration. And second, it’s just plain entertaining to see how the same object or theme works across games of different styles and genres. At least I think it is.
Yes, you could just google this, but it’s my hope that my images may offer something in an easy way that may actually be useful to someone. Also, it would be a shame to let all of my work go to waste.
So here we go with the first one – lighthouses.
