Originally published on michael-kaminski.io.
The Genome of Games publishes the same 1,180 records four different ways, and one command writes all four: node build.js, 0.39 seconds, zero npm dependencies.
Out come 1,245 static HTML pages for crawlers, an interactive canvas graph for humans, a 129,037-byte search index for the site's own search box, and a Model Context Protocol server exposing 8 tools to agents.
The decision worth copying is the one that sounds like a downgrade. The MCP server does not query the site and does not read the source data. It statically imports a 1.9 MB index that the build wrote. There is exactly one place where slugs, lineage, and adoption edges get joined, so an agent and a crawler cannot come back with different answers.
The dataset is an ontology of video game mechanics — 168 mechanics, 618 games, 394 companies, 4,366 recorded links, 1962 to 2025. What the records are about does not matter here. The shape of the problem shows up anywhere a structured knowledge base has to serve both a search engine and a model.
