26/10/2025
"It's a mistake to only document the exceptional."
That line comes from 3kliksphilip's 2018 video The Simpler Things in Life. If you haven't seen it, you absolutely should before you continue reading. It briefly covers Philip's thoughts on memories and sorts of things we record, but mainly it serves as an example of how the parts of your life that feel ordinary and mundane are what form the core of nostalgia. Since the day I first watched it not long after it was uploaded, it's been one of my all-time favourite videos on YouTube. In fact, for a long time 3kliksphilip was one of my favourite youtubers, and someone I took a lot of inspiration from. He's always felt like a 2010 youtuber continuously struggling to adapt to the modern day: Prolific, nerdy, completely forthright, and consistently weird (and also very British). I only occasionally watch his videos these days, just as I no longer play Counter-Strike (Philip's main source of content) these days, but at this point I've been keeping up with him for so long that his late 2010s videos reminiscing over nostalgic late 2000s videos are now nostalgic to me.
Looking back, I owe a heck of a lot to Philip. Way back in the dark ages of 2008 he began making tutorials for building Source maps using the Source SDK, mainly for Counter-Strike Source maps specifically, with a massive repertoire of tutorials slowly collecting on the 3kliksphilip channel up until around 2012. Philip's core philisophy behind these videos was that the source SDK was a remarkably simple tool to use if you were only planning to use the features needed for basic maps, and so by making tutorials far shorter and more to the point than those by other experienced mappers at the time he aimed to considerably lower the barrier of entry for making CS:S maps. Taking this concept to the extreme led to some of the videos being less than a minute long. He loved the idea of getting new people into mapping, and the plan worked precisely as intended; Flocks of young people soon felt confident making and uploading maps for Source games, ranging from extremely basic to super creative and high effort, although, since this was still before the Steam workshop was a thing many of the low-quality maps ended up being uploaded to community-run websites, which inevitably led to Philip gaining a largely negative reputation in the mapping community.
Not only was I inspired by Philip's philisophy towards lowering the bar for entry for new people when I first discovered these videos around 2017, I was also inspired to start making maps for the newer Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. I started with a recreation of my high school, completely oblivious to the concerns regarding having a bunch of people shooting each other and planting bombs in a recreation of a real life high school (I was 14...). I did an abandoned laboratory, which I remember testing against a few of my friends, and adding more spawn points to allow for as many bots as possible, only to grow disappointed watching them all take the same path through the map every time. I did an industrial warehouse-type map, after which I drew up an ambitious plan for a map set on an island resort. Unfortunately I never got around to actually creating this map, as by this point my interest in CS:GO had waned.
I didn't even realise I still had this image until very recently when I was looking through my many folders of old images. In truth, I had completely forgotten I drew this, or even that I was planning on making this map in the first place. Something I couldn't have predicted when I was still making these was that CS:GO as a game practically does not exist any more. Valve completely replaced it with the new Counter-Strike 2 in players' Steam libraries in 2023 to avoid splitting the fanbase between the two games, so nowadays the only way to play it is by opting into a beta branch in the settings, something very few people have any reason to do. On top of this, because of the transition to Source 2 any maps made for CS:GO are unplayable on CS2. Valve has been kind enough to keep the workshop pages for my old maps, at least for now, although the actual map editor files are either buried somewhere in my mess of an old hard drive or lost to time entirely.
Still, it was very enjoyable to rediscover these old pictures that I haven't thought about in years, if also somewhat difficult for me. That's the bittersweetness of nostalgia; When I look back at these maps the speckle of map-making memories come attached to the deluge of memories from my teenage years in general, and only when I am swamped in old memories do I consider how drastically my life has changed in the past decade. Never again will I experience sending Steam messages to my high school friends on weekends asking if they want to try out my new map. At some point between then and now I lost contact with those people entirely, either I removed them from my friends list or they removed me from theirs, so those conversations are now lost as well. In 2018 I thought making CS:GO maps was going to be my hobby for years, if not forever. In 2020 CS:GO no longer really meant anything to me, nor did the four or five maps I made over afternoons and weekends. Now, in 2025, all I have from that period are a few of the maps that are effectively no longer playable, a single development screenshot, and an MS paint drawing. If I could go back in time to shake my teenage self and tell him to take more screenshots, to record more videos and tuck them away instead of throwing them away, to save the conversations that I thought meant nothing at the time, I would. But I cannot.
It's my turn to be completely forthright. Some time in early 2016 (when I was 12 years old) one of my middle school friends created a really basic clicker game in Scratch. Although I had never really given thought to the process of game development before, I found that I quite enjoyed giving suggestions for random new features for my friend to add to his game. Eventually, in June 2016, I decided to make a Scratch account and try making my own game. It was called Box Clicker.
Over the next two years I made dozens of Scratch games. Scratch's popularity and ease of access meant that I was seeing a surprising amount of traffic to my games. I made clicker games, point-and-click games, even a bullet hell-style game where you avoided various moving red objects in time with a song, which ended up being pretty much the same idea as the game Just Shapes and Beats, except I had the idea first!! My greatest highlight was when I created a fake OS inspired by the then-popular Windows 93, and the developers of Windows 93 later added a secret link to my version if you searched "Windows 93" in the site's built-in web browser.
Unfortunately, if you try this today, it won't work. Normally this is where I would put some more images of my old games, but when I went to check my Scratch account earlier this year, I found it had been unceremoniously deleted, along with all of my games. It was probably hacked, considering my password was extremely weak. And, of course, I never recorded any images or videos of any of my games beyond the single screenshot of Box Clicker, because A. I didn't think they were going anywhere any time soon, and B. They didn't matter all that much to me for a while. I went through the same cycle as with my CS:GO maps: In 2016 I thought I was going to be making Scratch games for years. In 2018 I moved on to doing other things, and my old games didn't feel so important. Now, in 2025, I wish I could go back and take another look at them, but they only exist in my memories. At one point a few years ago I had the idea to start making a catalog of every game I had made along with images, but after the first few games I grew bored and deleted it. Archival was not very high on my mind at the time.
I was not the only person who discovered the art of game development as a teenager. 3kliksphilip also discovered game dev a great many years back through a primitive piece of 90s game making software installed on his high school computers called Klik & Play. Klik & Play eventually evolved into "The Games Factory", then "Multimedia Fusion", and finally "Clickteam Fusion" in 2013. As a long time game developer, Philip had also created a series of simple tutorials for Fusion, which inspired me to beg my parents for it and start making my own little game applications in December 2017. My first ever game made using Fusion was a basic top-down shooter named "UltraKiller".
Unlike my 2016-2018 period of Scratch game development, the project files from my 2018-2021 period of Fusion game development are fully saved on my computer. I still occasionally open up old games to remember or to show my friends, but even the files on my computer have historically not been safe from another type of destructive force.
Up until a few years ago I only had a single 1TB hard drive, and eventually this drive filled up and my frugal ass decided to free up some space on it instead of investing in a second drive. This mostly involved uninstalling Steam games I wasn't playing and removing some of my thousand-plus Garry's Mod addons taking up over 100GB in total, but I undoubtedly deleted some of my old, "useless" folders of old videos and stuff as well. But this isn't even the main reason my files and documents disappear. Historically the main reason I've deleted things off my computer was just because I like to tidy up, and the old game screenshots, throwaway memes for my friends and other assorted junk didn't mean anything to me. Among my vast list of now-deleted media was a large number of Minecraft screenshots, which I now regret deleting most.
I've been playing Minecraft for over 14 years now. It is, by a mile, my most played video game. Since the day I first fell into a cave and couldn't get out since I hadn't yet gotten used to the WASD keys I've been playing Minecraft servers with my real life friends, my online friends, and my siblings, so many different servers in total that I've completely forgotten most of them by now. Unsurprisingly, as much as I would like to reminisce about the dozens of Minecraft modpacks I've played with friends and the things I've built, I screenshotted very few of them at the time, and there are even fewer I haven't since deleted. The ones I do still have bring back fond memories...
Up until recently I've given very little thought to preserving and archiving the things I've done. Even after watching The Simpler Things in Life multiple times over, the only change I really made was to start taking more selfies and pictures when I go out. I've always had the thought of "I might lose this stuff and I should back it up" in the back of my mind, now that I have more drives I've been backing up my most important files to them, but that attitude never extended to the amount of my life I record and the number of seemingly mundane moments I've deleted. I like to think I've changed by this point, if still probably a bit short the level of preservation I should be at, but either way it's definitely too little too late. So, this blog post serves as a warning to anyone reading not to do the same things I've done. More on that later...
I've gone through a great many eras in my life, many of which have been connected to my online presense in some way. Possibly the first was the period from around 2013 to 2016 when I first got an iPad and started making home movies using iMovie. I uploaded many of these movies to YouTube at the time, a raw glimpse into my simple life, but like many other things from my early life these videos are now permanently gone. Some time around 2016 I decided to delete my YouTube account in an attempt to start fresh, somehow not realising that doing so would also delete all of my videos. When I did realised what I'd done that loss felt really bad to me, not just because of the effort I put into those videos, but also because I would never get to see them again or share them with my friends. That was the first time I had that sort of feeling. Since that point I've been locked in a perpetual state of half-caring, worried about forgetting the experiences I've had and the things I've made but not willing to put in the extra effort to preserve them, because they're not going anywhere, right?
Since then I had my Scratch and Fusion game dev phases, my mapping phase, for most of 2021 I was mainly involved with the community for an idle game called Leaf Blower Revolution (which I had the fun opportunity to create some art for), and I spent most of my free time in 2022 on a single minecraft server with all sorts of wonderful people. I spent much of 2023 and 2024 making web games and building the community in my Discord server, and now in 2025 I'm producing video essays and getting good at Tetris. And when I play Tetris I think I could see myself playing this for years to come, that the people in the community that I talk to will remain friends for however many years more, but looking at my track record so far maybe that won't be the case. Maybe I'll move on sooner than I expected, who knows?
But I cannot keep assuming that I will remember all of these people, and all of the fun moments I've experienced, because unless I make an effort to preserve them I might not. I've almost certainly forgotten some moments have already, even recent ones. I stopped playing the Minecraft server I had spent all of 2022 on (and had assumed I would play for years more) after one of the admins accidentally deleted the server files, evaporating my months of builds and my friends' builds in an instant. Luckily one of my incredibly smart friends was able to piece most of the world back together and made it available to download, but I may not be so lucky the next time I lose something. And of the dozens of people I made friends with on that Minecraft server over that year, there are already only two or three that I still occasionally keep up with. My life moved on a lot quicker than I was expecting, and it wasn't until I started looking back again recently that I realised just how much I had completely forgotten about in those few years.
But my digital footprint definitely has expanded considerably since I started putting things out there and building a community. I distinctly remember one of the players on that server talking about how they were playing Leaf Blower Revolution, giving me a chance to proudly mention the art I had done for it. More recently someone who had watched one of my videos messaged me to say they remembered playing one of my games years prior and had just made the connection that they were watching a video from the same person! My first ever web game, a simple and janky incremental game called "Sushi Beans", was so poorly-made that a few years after I made it I didn't want to think about it; At some point I took the game off the internet and deleted it completely. But then, over the next months and years, people kept mentioning it and the fond memories they had playing it, some not even realising that the same person who was making newer games now also made Sushi Beans back in 2020. I realised that my sphere of influence now existed outside my control, other people were remembering parts of my life that I had since forgotten.
Once I started putting more time and effort into making and releasing games, I started treating myself as a tool with the express purpose of making things that other people enjoy. Maximizing net happiness. That was the ideal, at least. I still think this way to an extent; I chide myself for each day I spend sitting around instead of doing something or making something. I worry about wasting my life. Different people will give different answers as to whether pushing to increase my output to bring people enjoyment is an admirable goal, a misplacement of my self-worth, or simply a sure-fire path to mental exhaustion (I certainly haven't been feeling mentally refreshed recently). For the longest time I treated myself as if the things I do for me don't really matter, only my impact on other people. But now those past experiences do matter to me. I finally want to remember them, to preserve them so I can remember them forever more. So, I've been sorting through the scraps. Looking through the jumbled mess of old forgotten files on my computer and picking out anything that might mean anything to me, either now or many years from now. Scrolling through my old Discord conversations for images and videos of fun, silly moments with friends I stopped thinking about the day after they happened. And I'm trying not to delete as much anymore, although my drives are close to full again. I think the older people I know understood this feeling long before I did.
That's on me.
In case it's not obvious by now, my message to you with all of this is this: It's a mistake to only document the exceptional. Take the time to think about the sort of things you're doing, now, and take some pictures of them. Five years from now you'll definitely remember that big project you completed or that trip you went on, but you'll also want to remember how different your bedroom used to look, or that game you used to play religiously with friends you no longer talk to, or that voice call you stayed up all night for because you were having such a good time, or the very first time you tried making a game or a song or an art piece and wanted to forget about it because it was so bad. And don't ever delete them! If you accidentally took two screenshots of something or snapped a dozen pics of that place you visited just to be safe, then sure, you can cut down and still remember that moment just fine. But media doesn't exist solely to be seen by other people or to serve a functional purpose, you should also keep it for you.
It's never too late to start, even if I started too late. I hope that the memories I have preserved up until now outweigh the forgotten parts of my life, but if I get it right from this point on then I at least know future me won't travel back in time and shake current me about it.
