Video game developer Johnnemann Nordhagen, who has worked on Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, holds a special appreciation for locks and opening them in games. He has decided to make a new game to commemorate the history of the lockpicking mechanics and their evolution over the decades. Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking houses lockpicking mini-games from a myriad of games, including popular franchises such as: Deus Ex, Fallout, and Dishonored. He even created an analogue for the pen and paper DnD games that has been extremely influential on video games, especially the RPG genre.

“I tried to choose things that were unique or offered a new commentary on the mechanic,” Johnnemann Nordhagen told Polygon. He says that the idea comes from a Twitter thread, which brought up a game that was just about the various fishing mini-games that other games had used. Nordhagen was working on another project and was exploring older games to find ways to overcome a few problems he was having. “It’s a lot of trouble to dig up old games and play them until you find the pieces you want,” Nordhagen said.

After playing a lot of locking picking mini-games, Nordhagen went and recreating them in Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking. Replaying some of the older games, he found that a lot of the mechanics did not age as well as he remembered, but he was surprised with how many varied takes there were for lock picking. He enjoyed watching the mechanic evolve with each game and finding common trends and lineages with each generation.

Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking is still being updated with new locks to be cracked, and is a free resource for aspiring developers or gaming historians to use at a whim. Nordhagen does plan on creating more museums dedicated to other video game mechanics.