The Man Who's Spent a Lifetime Making One, Giant Map (Patreon)

Back in April, People Make Games traveled to Michigan to meet Jerry Gretzinger and the map he's dedicated decades of his life to making.As you'll see, it's a beautiful thing to stand in front of, but there are two big reasons we wanted to tell this story. First of all, it's not really the map that Jerry's been designing all these years, it's a deck of cards that instructs him what he's meant to do to the map each morning.Jerry is an 84-year-old man and is pretty removed from anything resembling the games industry, but this deck of cards is absolutely packed with what we recognized as game design. We were fascinated by that and Jerry, in turn, was fascinated by our fascination.And then, secondly, it turns out Jerry hasn't seen his map laid out in full in more than 14 years. Nobody has. That is until now.With the help of a team of over 20 volunteers, working over three days, we built Jerry's map in all its glory. And the result was spectacular.I know this documentary is a bit of a swing for a YouTube channel called People Make Games, but stick with us on this one, and I think you'll understand why we just had to tell Jerry's story. This may be one of the best things I think we've ever made!

Note for patrons:

Before you get going, I also wanted to mention the sponsorship you'll see at the end of this doc. Longtime viewers will know we've not taken sponsorships on the channel in years now, as we tend to maintain our focus on the Patreon and all the incredible support you've all provided to the work that we do.In the case of this particular video, to be frank, we've spent more money on getting this thing made than we've ever spent on anything before now. In this case, we needed to:

Fly Quinns and myself over to Michigan for the best part of a week

Hire an additional camera operator

Set up drone shots and time lapses of the map being constructed

Hire a large enough community space to build this crazy thing over three days

Rent a guest house to stay in

Hire a car to travel around Michigan

Feed three men in the United States of America

And that's without accounting for the enormous scale of the edit we then ended up with back home.Anyway, to get this thing over the line, we took a sponsorship with the streaming platform, which helped us pay for just over half of these expenses, or thereabouts. In exchange, we also created a bespoke, companion video that Nebula viewers can watch over there as of today.However, when we were negotiating this with Nebula, I wanted to make it clear that our patrons are the lifeblood of everything we do and even if you don't have a Nebula sub, I wanted you all to be able to watch this extra video as well. This isn't usually something that Nebula goes for, but in the end, we agreed that we'll able to share that companion piece with our patrons in exactly two weeks time. So look our for a post then, if you'd like to watch it as well.If you already have a Nebula sub, you can watch that companion video here, today.Or if you'd like to sign up for one, using our link, you can do so here.If not, we'll be sending it out in a post on Monday, 29th June.