Frequently asked

A way to find people you played games with and lost touch with. You register who you were — the handle you played under, the game, the server, roughly which years — and who you're looking for. A matcher compares the two sides and posts what it finds.

It's built for the case where you never knew someone's real name. A handle and a realm is all it needs.

No. It's in active development and there's no signup, waitlist or download. When there's something to install, it will be linked from the front page.

That's the minimum, and it's required — a search without a handle is rejected. The handle is the needle. Everything else you can remember (server, faction, platform, rough years) doesn't gate the search, it corroborates it: it ranks the results and explains on the card why each one surfaced.

A very common handle with nothing else attached is genuinely hard to match, and the app will tell you so when you file it rather than pretending otherwise.

Expected. Matching is fuzzy, so near-misses and typos still surface, marked ≈ rather than ✓ so you can see exactly which parts are approximate.

Very short handles are the exception — on three characters or fewer there's nothing meaningful to be fuzzy about, so those match exactly or by prefix only.

No, and this is one of the things it's specifically built to handle. Renames and merges are recorded as links between the old and new names, so the realm you remember still matches the realm they remember, even if one of you is naming it from before a 2017 merge and the other from after.

No. You are findable only through identities you registered yourself. Nothing is imported, scraped or inferred from anywhere else — if you never told Buddy Recall you were Kestrel, then nobody searching for Kestrel can reach you.

No. There's no way to send a message to someone you haven't both accepted. A pending match can't write to you, and there's no inbox for requests.

If you decide a match isn't the right person, declining is silent. The other side is never told they were turned down — from their view it's indistinguishable from you not having looked yet.

Because a browsable directory is how strangers start unwanted contact, and it would undermine the one guarantee the app makes. The whole model is that contact exists only through a match, and a match exists only because someone deliberately registered a memory specific enough to be found.

The side effect is a useful one: the specificity bar that makes matches good is the same bar that makes spam impractical.

The app has no game-specific knowledge built into it — every game, and every question it asks about that game, is data rather than code. That means a game can be added, and its fields worded in the language its players actually use, without shipping an app update.

The starting catalogue isn't finalised. If a game is missing you'll be able to ask for it.

An email address for signing in, a username, an avatar chosen from a fixed set, the game identities and searches you create, and any messages you send. Optionally, platform handles like Discord or PSN if you choose to add them.

Not stored: your real name, your phone number, any photograph, or your date of birth. Age is confirmed at signup and only the confirmation is kept, never the date. See the privacy policy.

Only after you have both accepted each other. Pending matches see nothing, and neither does anyone else. If you later disconnect from someone, those handles are hidden from them again.

The app puts adults who don't know each other into private conversation on the strength of a shared memory. Restricting it to adults is the honest way to run that, and the audience — people nostalgic for games from roughly 1998 to 2015 — is adult anyway.

Not decided. There's no pricing to announce and nothing is being sold yet.

Yes, and deletion removes your identities, your searches, your matches and your messages rather than merely hiding them.

Because conversations belong to both people, deleting an identity that has conversations attached will warn you clearly before it goes ahead — it ends those conversations for the other person too.