Billy Basso was glued to his computer. It was launch day for the Chicago developer's debut solo game, a surreal Metroidvania called Animal Well, and he couldn't stop reading reviews online and watching people play the game. He'd pulled off the impossible: breaking through a turbulent industry to create a hit game that would grow to be a critical and commercial success. He just didn't realize how big of one it would be quite yet. Most successful video games are made by teams of people that vary in size from a half dozen to somewhere in the hundreds.

In January 2020, players of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stumbled on a buried spaceship: a fully functional "Arwing" fighter from another classic Nintendo game, Star Fox 64. The Arwing was added as a programmer's shortcut to, essentially, teach a dragon how to fly. Once the dragon was airborne, the ship was hidden away in Ocarina of Time's source code, where hackers unearthed it 22 years later. "It's amazing to me that it was there all this time – it just took a lot of digging to find it," says Billy Basso, a game developer from Chicago. "It's completely inessential, but it helps people bond with how games are made, the creators behind them and the time and place. It connects you to history in a way."