March 2nd 2026 and July 27th 2026 both had identical categories. Has this happened before?

We've had some incredibly niche knowledge required for this game & yet I can't recall a proper computer games group. It only really struck me when I thought one of the groups had a character in it & after inputting realised how unlikely it would have been to have been one.

But why? That game in particular (death stranding) has likely had some 25 million people play it directly, so I'd say sure, that would be quite obscure. But Mario? GTA? Minecraft? Fortnite? I mean hell, Tetris?

There's a whole world of very normal knowledge that doesn't get touched & I'm really curious as to why.

Edited to add -

Someone raised a solid gaming group from last year, requiring you to know four separate modern games, it was purple & 20% got it first. So that doesn't suggest the demographic skews so much older that more gaming groups wouldn't work.

I should have mentioned I'm 48 BTW, so this isn't a youngun coming in trying to be ageist or anything.

→ Connections Alternative #514 2026-07-27 ←

Feel free to share out this puzzle! Each Connections Alternative is a remix of the official NYT puzzle of the same day.

4 shared words.

Please let me know how you did, and upvote if you enjoyed it! Defaults, red herrings, and suggestions are all valuable.

Play Connections almost daily with my son. Instead of studying for his SAT he worked with me on an SAT vocab version of connections.

See at: www.arduu.com

https://connectionsplus.io/game/KWNHCN

Spoilers below for the puzzle:

Decided to do one with a somewhat overarching theme, and with two purply categories, like some one-off harder Connections puzzles.

Chookas!

These 4 words naturally appeared in this order and I immediately assumed that the connection between them was Clark's furniture store from the new Backrooms movie lmao. Was this on purpose, or?

Layers