I’m Rowan.
I live in Eugene, Oregon, in the upstairs unit of a house built in 1927. The windows face north, which means I get a lot of gray light, especially between October and May. My desk sits under one of those windows, and from where I type, I can see the top of a big maple tree that sheds leaves onto the roof for about three weeks every autumn. I never clean them off. The landlord doesn’t care, and I like the way they look when they’re wet and dark.
My cat is named Turing. He’s ten, gray, and has chronic kidney disease, which means I give him subcutaneous fluids every evening. He sits on my lap while I do it, and he doesn’t flinch anymore. I think he trusts me, or maybe he’s just accepted that I’m the one who makes the scary things happen and then gives him treats afterward. I don’t know which is more accurate, but I’ll take either.
By day, I work as a data systems analyst for a mid-sized medical technology company. I build dashboards that track patient outcomes, error rates, and resource allocation. I spend most of my daylight hours inside spreadsheets that reduce human pain, loss, and fragility into clean little cells with decimal points. I’m good at it. I also hate it, quietly, in the way you hate something that pays your rent and gives you good health insurance.
I have a master’s degree in computational linguistics, which is a fancy way of saying I studied how language can be modeled, parsed, and measured. I wrote a thesis about sentiment analysis in video game reviews—how players use adjectives differently depending on whether they finished the game or abandoned it. It was a very niche, very useless project that taught me one thing: people are terrible at describing their own feelings. They say “boring” when they mean “lonely,” and they say “broken” when they mean “unforgiving.” I’ve never stopped listening for those mismatches.
I don’t think I’m a writer. I think I’m someone who takes notes, and eventually those notes get long enough that they look like essays. I carry a Moleskine notebook everywhere, the kind with the elastic band, and I fill it with sentences I scribble down when I’m waiting for coffee or when Turing does something mildly absurd. Most of those sentences never make it into any post. But some of them do, and the ones that do usually start with a memory.
Like: The first time I finished a game, I was thirteen. It was a PS2 game called Ico, which I had rented from a Blockbuster that no longer exists. I didn’t understand the story—I didn’t speak English well yet, and the game had almost no dialogue anyway. But I remember the feeling of reaching the end, watching the credits scroll over a beach, and realizing that nothing had really changed in my room, but something inside me had moved. I couldn’t find words for it then. I still can’t, but I’ve gotten better at circling around it.
That’s why I started Memory Card Theology.
Not because I think old games are better. They’re not. Half of them are clunky, ugly, padded with bad design, and stuck on hardware that could barely breathe. But they were specific. They had limits—memory limits, polygon limits, CD-ROM limits—and those limits forced designers to make decisions that modern pipelines don’t usually require. You couldn’t just add more grass. You couldn’t just increase the draw distance. You had to think about what to include and, more importantly, what to leave out. That kind of restraint is rare now, and I miss it.
I also started this site because I got tired of the way nostalgia gets sold back to us. Every remaster, every remake, every “definitive edition” comes with a promise: Remember this? It’s better now. But better isn’t always true. Sometimes it’s just different. Sometimes the improved lighting washes out the original mood. Sometimes the new voice acting removes the strange, endearing awkwardness of the old performances. Sometimes the “quality-of-life” patch that speeds up inventory management also speeds up the quiet dread that made the game work in the first place.
I want to write about those differences without yelling. I don’t want to be outraged. I don’t want to be a contrarian. I just want to look closely, compare thoughtfully, and let the reader decide whether a change is a gain, a loss, or neither.
My approach is probably too slow for the internet. I spend hours on a single frame comparison. I map out frame pacing differences by recording video and counting frames in Premiere. I collect Steam review text and run it through a simple Python script to see what words cluster around the 2-hour mark versus the 20-hour mark. I do all this because I genuinely enjoy it, not because I think it makes me more authoritative than anyone else. I’m just curious. And I think curiosity, when paired with patience, usually finds something worth sharing.
On the other side of that curiosity is the part of me that I don’t show easily. I’m private, maybe overly so. My long-distance relationship lives mostly in texts and weekend phone calls. My friends live in other cities, and we catch up in group chats that go quiet for weeks. I spend a lot of evenings alone, with Turing and a controller, revisiting games I already finished years ago. I don’t mind it. But sometimes, when a certain soundtrack plays or a certain save room appears, I feel a hollow that isn’t sad—it’s just present. It reminds me that games are one of the few places where I can be vulnerable without being exposed.
That’s what I try to write about, too. Not just the technical stuff, but the weird emotional residue that old games leave behind. The way a quiet loading screen can feel like a breath. The way a bad camera angle can make you feel isolated in exactly the way the developer intended. The way a texture, low-resolution and blurry, can somehow hold more memory than a 4K scan.
I don’t have all the answers. I’m not a journalist, a historian, or a critic. I’m just a guy in Eugene with a gray cat, a steady job, and a habit of thinking too much about things that most people stopped thinking about twenty years ago.
If that sounds like your kind of place, you’re welcome here. If not, that’s fine too. The internet is huge, and you don’t need another person telling you what to feel about pixels.
But if you do stay, I’ll do my best to make the reading worth the time. I won’t post often—maybe twice a week, maybe less. I won’t chase news cycles or clickbait. I’ll just keep taking notes, comparing screenshots, and trying to figure out why some games, even the broken ones, still feel more alive than half the things I see on my dashboard.
And if Turing jumps on the keyboard mid-sentence, I’ll probably leave it in.
Thanks for reading this far.
— Rowan
Eugene, Oregon
2026