Elasto Mania time jump
What an amazing and surreal feeling it was to find it. I’d actually kind of given up the hope of ever seeing it again. I didn’t have any backups that old. All the hardware from back then I trashed long ago. The few external hard drives that I kept were a bit too recent. Googling didn’t help, nor did searching in any of my mailboxes.
Last Friday I had friends over to play some retro games on the Switch: Elastomania and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. Good times. That evening I checked out moposite.com and found a great number of level packs. Too big to just start downloading and inspecting, but a seed was planted. Maybe, after all this time, could I find my self-created levels over there?
Turns out it was even easier. Via the ‘Elsewhere’ section on moposite.com I quickly landed on elmaonline.net where I found the levels search page. Without any expectations I searched for ‘xneo’, my nickname back then.
I was surprised to see results, but not sure how to interpret them. I mean, it must have been more than 20 years ago that I created these levels. I scrolled down further and my heart rate increased by seeing Xneo025.lev. Was that me? I didn’t know for sure about the hotmail address, but it felt vaguely familiar. The ‘themasters’ reference: that must be me, right? Next to ‘xneo’ I remember calling myself ‘xneothemaster’. Are these really all my levels?
I kept scrolling and scrolling, checking out each level. How cool is it, that you can actually preview the levels in your browser like this. This came truly unexpected.
With every level I viewed my memories became stronger. I imagine this is what it feels like opening a time capsule. My very own time capsule. I felt so grateful somebody archived it. That a bit of my early days online were archived. What a day.