Signs of Progress

I am a prototype junkie. I love work in progress. I love demo tapes for music, early shots of movies or TV shows, and test builds and betas of video games and other software. I love seeing things progress, and what they have looked like during their progress. It's one of the things I like to collect.

I have saved copies of the early teaser site for "Project GU", before the actual .hack GU was first announced. I have copies of every video released for it, and the prototype trailer for that as well, which was their pitch for the game to the investors. I also love that they created a novel series based on the storyline from the prototype, which ended up being different then where the games ended up. I followed versions of Vista from early in 2004 through PDC and WinHEC builds running on our test machines at my work at that time, as well as participating in all of the betas, and watched it progress from the Longhorn of back then to the Vista we all know now. I've seen sites dedicated to the collecting of test builds and prototypes of video games, with the grandest of that being the release earlier this year of a massive dump from the Sega USA QA archives, releasing a ton of progress builds of a ton of games from that time. I have other miscellaneous game trailers lying around in my folders, which show a difference between some aspects of an original game trailer and the final game we came to know.

The progress of history is just as important as any one point, having a look at what led up to something can give even more insight then the item itself. This is why I love resources such as the Internet Archive, and other things that enable the progress of history. And I will use them as well, using the resources at hand to document and exemplify progress, the current item in question being Spiral Island. I have two videos on YouTube so far showing off the map editor, one for the early work, and one for the current state, and I will start showing off actual Spiral Island stuff soon. Not much, because I don't want to spoil things, but enough that progress can be documented, and I can release a much larger demonstration of progress once the development is finished.

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As a side note, for some reason it didn't automatically activate one of my timed entries for the post mortem, and after I manually activated it it wouldn't go into the right order, so I had to delete the last few entries and repost them. That is why they all are dated today.