damas
What is Manifold Garden and why is it worthy of being exceptional? (I have no idea but the thread might benefit from a couple sentence description of each thing)
HL2 is a pretty well regarded game with significant tech strides and is about to have its 20th Anniversary so I can see the desire for it to be included.
hopefully fitting in with the theme, although without video from the developers
OpenGoal (Jak and Daxter and Jak II)
This is a reverse engineering of the GOAL language used by Naughty Dog for the creation of the jak and daxter games and allows for the native playing of jak/2/3 on PC. At time of writing Jak and Jak2 are able to be played all the way through with Jak2 still having some audio issues. I think the fact that they wanted to play around with a unique language like GOAL and managed to get the games playable is fascinating. Sadly I couldn't find any videos of the devs talking about it but they do have some blogposts with updates.
From what I can see, they redid their website so the oldest blogpost they have is from September 2022. The project started in 2020 and the progress they made in two years is incredible.
Main site:
https://opengoal.dev/
Lego Island Decomp
I was more of a Lego Island 2 kid, but 1 is interesting in its own right
Old Windows games are interesting because they get to a certain age and just kinda stop working on modern windows. I've often found that linux+wine can run some older stuff better but in the case that it doesn't work out or whomever wants to use windows.. They can get inspired.
This one has a video which is quite interesting:
Github Link to the project page
For me this is cool and interesting, but the thing that I think helps is that the guy MattKC has done more projects as well with this being the most recent:
