Forty-Five Seconds of Spring

The Nobilia market, Secret of Evermore, Super Nintendo, October 17, 1995. The first time through, traders in every stall, chickens, spices, amulets. When you returned later in the game, all the stalls were empty. The goats, hovering doves, and guards were gone. I wondered what was beyond all the boxes and barrels, and I longed to go back to trading rice and beads and annihilation amulets. I never traded there again.

Even if I needed beads or an amulet, the game had cut me off from the market. While I was trading, I never noticed that I needed the market. The loss of that need is the strongest part of the memory.

I don’t remember the last purchase at the market: beads or amulets. I only know it already happened. I think that is the core switch for nostalgia: the moment you realize you cannot go back, or that you’ve already been there for the last time.

In Secret of Mana, in the Forest of Seasons, I clearly remember the pink trees. For the first time in the game, the forest changed. I don’t remember the puzzle, only that you may have had to go forward a season and come back. I remember wondering what was beyond the trees. Illusion of Gaia, Mt. Kress, Super Nintendo, September 26, 1994. Again not the vine walkways or the puzzle: running across the caps of giant mushrooms. What could be at the base of this mushroom canopy?

That wondering grew heavier when I couldn’t go back to a place: did I explore it fully? In Secret of Mana, places I could never go back to: the North Forest, Mana before it was destroyed, the floating continent. Or in Final Fantasy VI, when entering the World of Ruin, did I find all the secrets in the World of Balance? Or the rain at the beginning of A Link to the Past, which never comes back. I think there is a huge weight in the loss of the unexplored. Maybe I did explore it all, but I can never know, and that unknown is what stays.

Octopath Traveler taught me to see the loss coming. I started to recognize when a character’s story was about to end, and realized there was probably no point in coming back to that area afterwards. So I lingered and went slower to enjoy it, because I didn’t know if I would enjoy the next area as much. I could taste part of the nostalgia before the chapter closed. More than anything, permanence makes the nostalgia concrete and undeniable.

Each of those places took hours to become somewhere I could miss. So what constitutes nostalgia, and can it be made from only recent experiences? To find out, we ran a one-shot test on three models: Gemini, GPT-6 and Opus. Each model got the same seed: a small market in spring, a path to an old stone, and about ninety seconds. Touch the stone and the season turns. Then you are back in the market, and it is fall. Unlike Octopath, nothing warned that spring was ending. There was no chance to linger. The separation was forced, so the permanence was manufactured, maybe more than I intended.

Forcing it was a shortcut to something games, movies and books do slowly: they create places wondrous enough to be missed, whether their makers intended it or not. I wanted to know if a small prototype could do the same on purpose. I designed the experiment, so I roughly knew what would happen, but not how. That left room for me to be surprised as a player, not only as the designer.

But any surprise lands on old ground. The prototype was a market too, and I can’t fully separate Nobilia from the new stalls that woke it. What I felt may have been Nobilia, amplified. The new market adds to it, and becomes the ground for the next one.

In Gemini, it just switched from spring to fall. The whole tile set, all the colors, immediately. Zero seconds. The scene had some points of interest, circles around certain objects, but pressing space on them did nothing. With no transition and nothing to interact with, there was no particular sense of longing. Had those circled objects done something, they would have given me something to lose.

In GPT-6, the stone didn’t glow, and the entire scene faded to dark. Before that, movement was so slow it became frustrating, and the slowness took something from the loss. After the change, I didn’t want to walk back down to the edge of the map, whereas in the other two I did.

Opus created a cozy entrance to the village, with a lot more life and detail. Because there was more to look at, I moved side to side instead of just walking up. I noticed butterflies drifting through the air above small flowers, a house by the path, the smoke in the chimneys.

The stone glowed, then the screen turned white, then fall faded in. The stone’s pulsing glow grew into that same white, so it looked like the stone itself had brought the fall. Then brown and orange leaves came down over the path where the butterflies used to fly. The smaller things changed too: the faded colors on the flags, the red apples in the stalls.

Gemini’s instant switch was the most forced separation of the three, and it showed what the transition does. Without a transition, spring and fall never came apart. Whether the place is genuinely lost matters less than whether it feels lost. A longer version could let you visit the spring market again. Even so, the moment the season changes, the contrast between what you saw and what you see now opens the distance nostalgia needs.

Distance alone is not enough, though. The place has to be worth staying in, and none of the three models made the screen feel like that. Opus came closest by leading me into the village, the path drawing me towards the stone. A natural level design choice, and very linear. What was missing was the promise of discovery: a side path, some hint of something more. Gemini’s circles had offered that hint and then given nothing. In many other games, the townspeople would have been the hint, and I would have tried to talk to them. I knew you couldn’t in this one.

Still, the Opus prototype produced a seed of nostalgia, enough to make me want to play it one more time. It came from an easy walk past the butterflies and chimney smoke, then a glow that guided me into a huge contrast. The walk took the first forty-five seconds of a ninety-second run; the glow came the moment I touched the stone. So forty-five seconds of spring is enough to create a seed of nostalgia.

If I only liked the presentation, then the forty-five seconds proved nothing about nostalgia.

So I played Opus again. I chose Opus because it was by far the most attractive of the three, not to see spring again.

Still, this time spring held a curiosity it hadn’t before, because I knew what I would miss. I had not noticed the watermelon in the trader’s hands. I paid special attention to the little girl and her dog, and the lanterns hanging from the trees, all things I knew were about to disappear.

And the nostalgia survived that return. The market stayed the same, but my relationship to it didn’t.

The first playthrough is the one I’m sure of. In Opus, the nostalgia started the moment the glow faded; neither of the other two produced it.

After the glowing transition, the autumn leaves fall downward, and following them pulls you down the path, curious about what else has changed in the village. As you reach the bench and the tree, you wonder what happened to the smoke in the chimneys. What happened to the girl and her dog? What happened to the house by the path? What happened to the market stall that was your first point of interest? They are the same questions I once asked among the empty stalls of Nobilia.

The three prototypes: projectnothing.ai/experiments/nostalgia-codec

I used Claude, ChatGPT and ProseMap to shape my dictated observations, interspersed with manual editing.