Skip to content
Menu

Notes ·

Walk Through Video Game History

noclip.website, created by Jasper St. Pierre and a community of contributors, describes itself simply as:

“A digital museum of video game levels.”

You can load a level in your browser and freely move through it using your keyboard, exploring familiar places without enemies, timers, objectives, or the usual boundaries.

The collection is heavy on Nintendo, with levels from games such as Mario Kart 64 and Wii Sports, but it also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, Grand Theft Auto III, World of Warcraft, and many others.

It is nostalgic, but it is also a fascinating way to study level design. Places that once felt enormous can look surprisingly small from above, and you can see how developers used camera angles, fog, landmarks, movement speed, and careful layouts to create the illusion of a much larger world.

The open-source project contains thousands of commits and custom support for many different games and rendering formats. This is not just a gallery of screenshots. It is a serious game-preservation and reverse-engineering effort.

Explore the levels at noclip.website.

All notes