Faxanadu, every single shop, by Spencer Stewart.

This is my absolutely terrible rendition of just about any given shop in Faxanadu for the NES. It doesn’t help that I’m not the best drawer in the first place, but using a mouse to draw makes it even worse. I hope this causes at least one other person to remember their mantra. 

[Josh says: hey, minimalism has it’s charms.  And man oh man I haven’t thought of Faxanadu in a long time.  I think I must have rented it once, because I don’t remember much of what comes up on googling but I have a small potent memory of the basic gameplay interactions.]

Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale, Hades, by jvvi.

I know, the games not actually out yet, but I’ve watched the gameplay video so many times it’s imprinted in my memory more than most games I’ve actually played.

I really love this stage. Hell, I loved it in God of War 3. I can’t wait to play it.

[Josh says: Ha!  We should have a whole “draw a map from a game you haven’t actually played” challenge some time.]

The Legend of Zelda, world map excerpts, by Josh Millard.

I should clarify that this is woefully incomplete not because I can’t remember any more of the map but because for some fool reason I convinced myself I could do the whole map basically screen-perfect from memory and then found out in the trying that that was a ridiculous, demoralizing thing to attempt.

And so these drawings, across three sheets of paper (measured out carefully to 16*8 screen proportions on the graph paper but pasted together not-to-scale here in order to make the emptiness a bit less sprawling), stop the moment I was Not Quite Sure about how a screen broke across to the adjacent one.  Or in a couple cases, a screen too late — I’m certain that on the left end of the central section I divvied up the screen real estate wrong.  And I knew it as I was doing it.  And so I stopped.

I’ve been meaning to come back to this one for weeks and weeks now, and I keep not quite having the will to make myself crazy on it again.  I know ninety percent of the remaining map reasonably well, but not well enough to glue it all together without a reference like this.  It’s a maddening little feat — and defeat — of memory, the way individual screens come to mind without effort but slotting them into one precise puzzle of map with a ballpoint pen just doesn’t happen.  How uncertainty over where the tiles of the map went moving from screen A to screen B blossoms into a kind of mind-melting circle of doubt.

Because, the thing is, I’ve spent a lot of time with the Zelda map. 

Not just as a kid, though to be sure I spent a great deal of time with it, it was one of my early NES loves and I’d scoured most of the map in great detail, burning every bush, bombing every rock wall, memorizing the locations of the heart container. 

But more recently, even, less than two years ago, I spent days building Hyrule’s overworld from scratch in Minecraft from reference maps.  I felt after that like I had the map tattooed in my mind, indelible, unforgettable.

And yet, here we are.  Memory fades.

Halo 2, Warlock, by wuz sup.

I hope I can do a map I made in sketchup for your blog. It’s from memory. I took some stylistic liberties where my beginner sketchup skills failed me. It’s Warlock from Halo 2, my favorite Halo game. This isn’t my favorite map though; Terminal was probably my favorite (warthog jump + guardian train). But I decided to do Warlock because it’s where I first fell in love.

We traded gamertags at school. It was our first online match. It was in Team Doubles, the most romantic playlist. I remember the exact moment, if that helps: At some point in the game he got a double kill and felt compelled to affirm it by shouting, “Double kill sonnnn!!!”

“What an asshole,” I thought.

[Josh says: ha!  Love at first frag.  Sketchup work looks great, this is a neat variation on the theme.  Thanks for the submission!]

Diablo II, every floor of Jail/Catacombs, by Alex Biffar.

It is currently the eve of Diablo 3 and I have Diablo on the mind and was also looking for something to kill the last 24 hours, so here you go. Over 9,000 hours in MS paint, bask in its glory. Seriously though, sorry it is way uglier than my previous submissions, I drew it without really expecting to submit it, but figured “what the hell” at least it is somewhat topical.

Since these floors were randomly generated, this is more of a “commentary” about how seemingly every single time the staircase to proceed would always be the very last room left to clear. This happens pretty much everywhere in the game for me, but it seemed particularly frequent in Act 1.

[Josh says: see also how the more people you are playing multiplayer with, the more likely it is that you’re stuck going through tiny one-at-a-time worm tunnels in Act II.  Everything about Diablo 2 that wasn’t awesome was TERRIBLE.]

X-Com, medium-sized alien craft, by Josh Millard.

I’ve mentioned that I love X-Com (oh hey, the Xenonauts Kickstarter hit its funding goal! And way early!), and one of the things that made it so great was the way a little bit of chance and quirks of the AI meant that the same setup for a given mission could play out a lot of different ways.

Which is a good thing, because one of the things that was not random was the layout of the actual alien ships themselves.  And there were a number of different ships in the game, on a size continuum from the teeny tiny probe that could house a single pilot on up to really huge four-story things that were fifty yards across and stood on four massive legs that were themselves each the size of entire small alien craft.

But the thing about a game like X-Com is that, because you end up loving it a whole lot and playing it to death, you see those same ship types again and again and again.  And maybe this time the ship landed near a barn, and maybe that time it was a crash and half the aliens are dead, and maybe one time the alien crew is spread out in the countryside trying to snipe my guys as they climb a hill vs. the next time when they’re all hanging out in the engine room pissing their xenopants, but: but the ship is always the same.  It’s the constant in the equation.

So the layouts got pretty familiar.  I can’t even remember for sure whether this was actually the “medium” ship or the “small”, and I may have goofed on the placement of some detail here, but there’s no question that this was the ship I was going to find if I chased down or shot down this craft type.

There were eventually mods written for X-Com that made it possible to use random layouts for the ship interiors, which is a pretty neat idea and something I’ve enjoyed playing around with occasionally.  But for those core, brain-searing memories of my earliest love affair with X-Com, the ships were always the same.  This ship was always this ship.

Super Mario 64, Whomp’s Fortress, by Sara.

 I love this game and this site, so I thought I’d have a go at drawing Whomp’s Fortress. Needless to say it looks awful.

[Josh says: it gets the job done, that’s the important thing.  Thanks for the submission!]

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, The Southern Sea, by Zach.

Notes: I wish I had made notes on the in-game map that says what item you get from what little island, because then this would have been a little bit more interesting. Sadly, all I remember is that you get sheep cheese from the island north of the main port.

[Josh says: this is just super great.  And EO is a wonderful game as far as meta-level map stuff goes, what with the built-in drawing-a-map-on-graph-paper game mechanic.]