Denied Nostalgia

Filed Under: Personal

I discovered (or rediscovered?) today that I’ve lost a lot of my university projects because they were either on Bitbucket¹ or on a PC hard drive that died in 2020ish, only some of which was backed up. Lost forever now are:

• The GameBoy Advance demos and games I made as part of a first-year module. This included a version of Asteroids and a software 3D renderer.
• Fixed-function OpenGL programming projects. I barely remember these, so I’m curious to see what I came up with.
• Some PlayStation Vita coursework. There were some cool ideas in there, like a 2D platformer where you made bubbles to walk across gaps.
• My fourth-year Honours project, which took an idea I’d experimented with in an earlier module, voxel space rendering using a compute shader, and dived into it in depth.

Also gone are various small extracurricular and game jam projects.

Alas.

There’s an odd kind of grief here, of nostalgia denied, of the past decomposing from recorded history into fuzzy memory. I’m not sure how to articulate it. I wanted to reflect on who I was before I started working at Rockstar, revisit some old projects, and perhaps mine them for experience, ideas, and resumé material – but I can’t.

Try to back up your stuff, folks. Obviously don’t go overboard with it, but you never know what you’ll miss when it’s gone.