Day 85 - here's an idea

You know me by now, I'm all about sharing thoughts and ideas for this thing.  I've had a couple lately, but bear in mind that even at 85 days in, these are still the very early stages and anything I dream up might not necessarily happen.

One of my ideas has stemmed from digging through some of my old stuff.  In there, I found a book: Kerrang!" Direktory of Heavy Metal: The Indispensable Guide to Rock Warriors and Headbangin' Heroes.

Yes, that's the whole title.  That's not what I'm taking from it, though.  The book is an A-Z of heavy metal groups, from the late Sixties up until the book's publication in the early Nineties.  Now, I'm not going to cover a timescale like that.  But I was already planning around doing this in some kind of A-Z format... this got me thinking a bit deeper.

Hands up if you had the faintest idea what you were doing when you played this?

Who am I to decide who our Gods were?  I've got a big list of people to include, sure.  But is it big enough?  I'm considering having entries for a much higher number of people.  Even if it's just a name and what they worked on, and maybe a personal recommendation as to what you should try from their works, I think it might be worthwhile.  Much of the point of books like this is having your memory jogged by something you might have otherwise forgotten, and saying "Ohhh yeah!" with a smile.

Naturally, there will be plenty of large entries with lots of text and quotes.  That's always been the plan, and it remains so.  But this is something interesting to mull over in the coming weeks.

This idea throws up another possibility for consideration: if I do make this a much bigger A-Z-style project, do I also make it more international?  I really, really want to cover the British programmers that don't get the mentions they deserve in these kinds of publications.  Don't get me wrong there, my focus on them will not shift or diminish one little bit.  But the other programmers were our Gods, too.  You think back to the classic Accolade titles, for instance, or Interplay's RPGs.  We loved them, so should they go in?

Much like a famous American from the past, my mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.  In other words, I've got a lot to think about.  And it's all great.  I'm really enjoying myself doing this.