%20banner%20by%20IntroIntroduction.png "Pixel anthropomorphic raccoon head with a blue hat. Art by introdile"){kind=tracking}
![[text ID: I sell trash and trash accessories end ID] Text is next to an amazing anthropomorphic raccoon trash merchant. He wears a blue hat and a blue hoodie. Art by Tornatics on Twitter.](https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/b5ff0a3e-4238-4bab-b637-22f1b67d111e/Remmy%20Trash%20Sticker%20Animated%20Tornatics.gif "[text ID: I sell trash and trash accessories end ID] Text is next to an amazing anthropomorphic raccoon trash merchant. He wears a blue hat and a blue hoodie. Art by Tornatics on Twitter.")
very much recommend checking out melos han-tani's wonderful essay based on a talk given at UBC last weekend:
this also follows a similar thread to something i wrote in a post earlier this year, spurred on by thoughts melos has written about before. really worth!
wonderful essay with so many valuable ideas. i quickly realized that i have been thinking fairly consciously of my ludoancestry for some time now, most explicitly when i started working on Autobiographical Architecture six years ago (and have long since stalled; hopefully someday i will be able to return and finish it). in exploring and narrativizing and spatializing my (gulp) life story and path as a professional and hobby game creator, i realized that i am deeply connected to at least three distinctly recognizable lineages:
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the "1138 lineage" of Lucasfilm Games / LucasArts, with which my first contact was playing Maniac Mansion as a wee lad and culminating many years later with working on an adventure-platformer with Ron Gilbert.
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the "0451 lineage" of Looking Glass Studios, via the original System Shock and Thief: the Dark Project, which led me to Irrational and 2K Marin some years into my professional career, and has experienced multiple cycles of decline and rebirth over the years.
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the "666 lineage" of id Software, a world i entered by pedaling home Wolfenstein 3D shareware floppies on a hot summer day in 1992, through the industry-reshaping technodemonic revelations of Doom, through Quake and everything it begat (including, to some extent, Half-Life and Valve), that gradually became a somewhat more complex and interesting space for me as Doom's community has expanded and splintered to become the quasi-medium it is today.
but there are so many other lineages out there, and some of them overlap and intertwine, many have blurry boundaries, some of them even stop abruptly, and that's all okay. the value of thinking of games in terms of lineages is about connecting things you enjoy and/or create to each other, to the humans who created them, to your own life, and to the broader canvas of human experience. this is what it means to be a creative medium and to be in conversation with it.
