My Story - Ground Zero

Last year was a chain reaction of events that left me in an array of mild disbelief. Though it isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in my life, 2023 was still pretty intense in that regard. I’ll try to summarize this as well as I can. Apologies for the people with a low attention span.

For me 2023 started with my intention to build something. I landed a steady job and had a promising date. Unfortunately that was not to last. I didn’t reach the approval period and my date ended shortly thereafter. All this while attending the funeral of my uncle. I suppose you can guess my state of mind at that time.

So that was January for me. I had to crawl back to just being alone, unemployed and frustrated about the turn of events. So when I feel bad like this I stick my hand back in the sand and crawl behind my gaming consoles. At that moment Metroid Prime Remastered was released, a polished new version of a game that I consider the pinnacle of gaming, for reasons that I’ll get into later. 

Through its unlockable art galleries Metroid Prime at the time has been a huge influence on my style as an artist. In that regard I consider it as influential as artists like Salvador Dali and M.C. Escher. 

So playing through that experience again was at least something to lighten my days. During the playthrough I noticed something. The game design is strictly room-to-room, yet it feels like an open cohesive whole. That got me wondering how the world of Tallon IV would look from a greater distance.  

And you know what? I like drawing maps, I’ve got nothing else going on and I started with mapping out two of the six areas. I thought it looked pretty cool and I wondered what other fans of Metroid would think of it. So I dropped it in a dedicated facebook group and waited for a response...