Technology has swiftly delivered us to a level of technological skill so elevated that an entire planet simulated within the bits and bytes of a computer system is a mundanity. Today players need never wait for data to be shuffled off of a disc and onto memory. Information roars beneath our fingertips, speeding from place to place faster today than it has in the history of the species.

17 years ago though, tech was crappy. Like SUPER crappy. You wanted to get a song off Limewire? You had to listen to this tune for 5 minutes, wait another 5 for the software to connect, then start the download and hope your Mum didn’t need the phone in the half hour it took your 4.3kb/s connection to deliver what would probably turn out to be the wrong song anyway.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon came out in 2000, when virtual worlds simply couldn’t be made large enough to fit an entire game’s worth of content in. Technology dictated that we split the world into different sections, or 'levels', which would be loaded and unloaded when necessary, normally through the use of a menu. A few years before Year of the Dragon was released, developers had begun to realize that simple menu-based level select screens were getting stale.

Some developers attempted to create the illusion of an interconnected and unbroken game environment, using doorways or long hallways to trigger loading-screens, releasing the previous area from the computer's memory and loading in the new area the player was about to enter. But many games, especially platformers, stuck more closely to their roots, refusing to hitch their wagon to the open-world train that was just beginning to roll, and instead exploring solutions that - at least for the younger audiences of the time - tended to be a lot more exciting. Developers attempted to redesign the level select menus of decades past as 3D interactive spaces. In the Spyro series, this concept was explored beautifully.