Why it can do this
Two things make an honest replay possible. First, the whole history is still on GitHub (every commit back to day one) so the early beats are real screenshots rendered from the actual old commits: my name on the page, the scramble into Must Design Games, the mid-June homepage. Not mock-ups: the past site, checked out and photographed.
Second, the site’s personality lives in motion (the intro sketches, the card fractal, the living Game-of-Life background) so for those beats the replay re-runs the actual sketch code, parameterised so the before-and-after is faithful: one helix becoming two and counter-spinning, the Hilbert curve losing its ghost, the sway slowing to a quarter. Real footage where it’s a page, live code where it’s motion. Either way, the real thing, not a picture of it.
What it says about the work
A portfolio usually tells you what someone made. This one lets you watch how they decided: the small, opinionated calls that add up to a point of view. That’s the part of design that’s hard to fake and easy to miss, so I built a way to make it the main event.