Yes, indeed, thank you all for your hard work on these maps!
I keep forgetting to check how many maps we now have exactly (and now that my Windows XP computer is dead, I'll have to find something other than CompuPic Pro to easily count the images across multiple folders) but I am sure it is around - and likely over - 30,000 maps.
Other than a few maps that are single screenshots, as I'm sure you're aware, many of these maps involve stitching together a number of screenshots, from a few to a few hundred. You often have to contend with layers, sprites, and using codes/hacking/extractions to reach areas you can't normally reach, etc. You know all this, of course.
If we estimate an average of half an hour spent on each map - though I'm sure that is a lowball estimate - that puts the total amount of time spent on making maps to around one million man-hours! [EDIT: Oops, that's a million man-minutes, not a million man-hours. Gah! That's still a lot though.]
That is over 114 years, among everyone who's ever sent in a map. If it was just one person, then they would have to have been mapping non-stop since 1900 to get this far on their own. And that's guessing on the low end, the reality could be that VGMaps.com hosts two or three centuries' worth of image-assembling! And of course if we count the hours spent playing and replaying the games in order to love them enough to want to map them in the first place, that's quite a time commitment we have all put in. And that's just ourselves - let's not forget that mapping is only reassembling what was already painstakingly put together by game designers and artists, whose creation of the original work is multiple times more effort than copying and pasting.
Thankfully there are dozens of mappers with the patience and desire to map these games. And I should stress "thankfully" there, in case it wasn't obvious, because many maps come in without anyone (including myself) even saying anything. I don't know if saying thanks on (American) Thanksgiving is any more or less thankful than any other time, but, with as much gratefulness as is possible just by you reading my words, thank you all!
While I haven't used many maps while playing a game, those few times I have, they were extremely helpful. And there are so many maps that I haven't yet used and many I unfortunately probably never will, but so many of them I just love looking at and appreciating them even if not directly with a playthrough. Chances are good that if you liked a game enough to map it, that there's someone else out there who likes the game too and appreciates your effort.
