Before the Archive

Nobody sat down to build an archive.

There was a flight over a green wireframe city, made to look like something found on an old CD-ROM. Then there was another small thing, and another. Each one pretended to come from a machine that no longer exists: a 1997 PC, a late-1990s homepage, an early-2000s 3D viewer.

Most of them were sketches. A few minutes of play, one idea, one mood. Some broke on the way. Some were finished just enough to be shown. And a couple refused to stay small.

At some point the folder of experiments needed a shelf. That shelf became LOST BUILDS: a DOS-style file manager for games that never shipped, with every build kept in the state it was left in.

ISSUES is the part of the archive that talks back. The file list tells you what exists. An issue tells you which builds mattered, and why.

This first issue goes back to the beginning, before there was an archive at all.