It feels really weird to know that I've been around since almost the beginning of the site. I remember asking around on The Castlevania Dungeon's message board if anyone was interested in screenshot maps for Circle of the Moon which was, I think, my first real attempt at making game maps, and finding that nobody seemed to care. Having been fascinated with fictional maps since I was a kid, I was glad to find a place like VGMaps where other map nuts could interact!
For years beforehand, I'd make maps in one format or another but that was before the Internet really existed as something that anyone had easy access to. I remember drawing maps by hand of the mansion and tunnels from the first Alone in the Dark PC game. I also used the Drawing functions of Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS (a now very defunct word processor) to reproduce, using ASCII characters, the full maps for the first Lands of Lore PC game that had been published in a French game magazine. And finally, I graduated to MS Paint for Windows 3.1 which I used to draw maps for a couple of Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny maps. Since I didn't know a map editor existed back then, I had to draw everything beforehand on grid paper, carefully pushing against every single wall to find secrets to make sure I found everything. I'm actually sad I no longer have these examples of my first few steps into game mapping land.
