Topic: VGMaps.com is now 18 years old!

[JonLeung]

VGMaps.com is now 18 years old!  (Well, it turned 18 yesterday, and I missed it.  How rude of me, as its parent, to miss such a milestone.)

I didn't really prepare anything for this, so, for discussion I guess we could go with:
1. how long have you used VGMaps.com, and
2. what maps do you think are possible in the next 18 years?

For me, obviously I've been here since the beginning, through a whim of "just trying this out for a year", thinking that images would be hard on bandwidth - guess I never imagined we'd get to the point when almost everybody streams HD video on multiple devices, so now, what's a few kB or MB for some .PNGs, right?  I remember getting it set up at the end of April (literally after I finished university) but it wasn't actually visible for a week because I had "index.htm" capitalized or something silly like that.  I was playing the then-new Resident Evil (the 2002 GameCube remake) at the time; funny that now my gaming backlog includes the recent remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3...

For a while I've wondered if there would be a 3D format that would be a ubiquitous enough filetype that it would be no different to put up than, say, a .PNG (or .GIF or .JPG).  Imagine something like The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time maps that we have but instead of 2D .PNGs at a fixed angle, they could be in a 3D format that we could just rotate and move around easily (with whatever is required to view them being standard in all browsers) to have a true 1:1 map (arguably maybe not exactly so with anti-alisasing and whatnot, but you know what I mean).  That said, first-generation 3D game consoles like the N64, PlayStation and Saturn could have many more maps, hopefully long before 2038!  Also, I hope there is still interest in the NES and Super NES that maybe someone will automate some way to map literally everything in every game for those consoles.  Would require some human input, I would imagine, but you never know, with AI these days, right?

What are your answers to those two questions?  And any other thoughts about the future of VGMaps?

[Will]

I'd like to see the day that VGMaps officially has a complete atlas one of particular game platform such as maps for all 22 Virtual Boy games. Hard to say if a complete atlas covering one particular console or computer will exist, since maps of even completed games continue to flow in. But in the event that it happened, it would be a record.

Realistically, I hope to see at least one map of every game platform in existence. Perhaps someone will introduce the Tiger Game.com into the list.

[G.E.R.]

I remember how I buy two books about video games in May 2002 in Rostov-on-Don. A book about Genesis / Mega Drive games, it has a green glossy cover and Sonic + Knuckles images from Soniс Adventure game, and a book about NES+SNES games, it has green cover also, but with Donkey Kong image (from DK Country).
They described all games secrets, a secret places and a places of various collectibles, but it was only a text descriptions, without any images or screenshots.
Authors recommended to draw a level schemes manually, on a paper. It was say that information (on this view) will be useful.

[JonLeung]

VGMaps.com is 19 years old today!  Maybe I could have started another topic, but meh, it's not really a milestone.  Next year will be 20 though!  That's a fifth of a century!  That sounds like a long time when saying it like that...