Tag: 8 bit

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Punktendo: The 8-bit punk games you didn’t play

The original Nintendo Entertainment System arrived on US shores during a divided era in American politics. The Iran hostage crisis concluded with eight American casualties in April 1980, marring the end of President Carter’s first term and contributing to a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan. The discovery of AIDS in 1981 preceded an epidemic that was especially devastating within the gay community throughout the decade. When the console launched in North America in 1985, Reaganomics were in full swing, and disaffected youth responded with the rise of hip hop and punk rock. However, early NES titles were yet too primitive…
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8-bit artist makes new autobiographical GIF every day

This article contains flashing images. /// Speaking to Vice’s The Creator’s Project, Italy-born, Shanghai-based illustrator Ailadi says “I like the combination of PETSCII 8-bit game aesthetic with subjects of common daily life.” She’s referring to her PETSCII series, an art project based around producing one new 8-bit gif per day, fittingly named after the character set from the line of 8-bit home computers Commodore produced in the ‘70s. “I mostly draw at night, just before going to sleep,” she tells Vice. “And the subject of it represents something about the day that just passed: something I did, I saw, that…
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Die, die, and die again in this Twitter-based adventure game

When I scroll through my Twitter feed, I’m never hard-pressed to find selfies, silly jokes, personal anecdotes, opinions on whatever dumb, ignorant thing Donald Trump said recently—but what I don’t expect to find is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, complete with pixel art gifs and a seemingly infinite number of choice-related deaths. Pixel artist Leon Chang “launched” (or rather “tweeted out”) his social media-based Choose Your Own Adventure game Leon on October 21st. While not the first to make such a game, Chang’s Leon is the first to combine both gifs of original pixel art and hundreds of burnout…
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Lucas Pope takes us down the dark path of retouching 1-bit visuals

Return of the Obra Dinn is an upcoming Lucas Pope game with visuals so quietly gorgeous and ghost-like that only a haunting story about being lost at sea could match it. Pope, seemingly having observred the beautiful 8 to 16-bit games coming out over the past couple years, has decided to double down, using 1-bit graphics that recall early Macintosh visuals from Apple’s gray, boxy glory days. Unsurprisingly this design choice has left Pope with some unique problems throughout development. In his latest blog post on TIGSource, he takes readers through one such issue step by step. After getting the uncanny sense…
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MANOS: The Hands of Fate-The movie-based game we never knew we needed

Generally speaking, videogame adaptations of movies have got to be the lowest tier in the hierarchy of bad videogames. Whether we’re talking about Austin Powers Pinball, the infamous E.T. the Extraterrestrial on Atari or 2011’s Smurf Dance Party (which featured such musical gems as “Who Let the Smurfs Out,” “I like to Smurf it-Smurf it” and “Smurf this Way”), movie-based games are almost always cheap, poorly put-together money grabs, riding on the gold-lined coattails of their successful film counterparts. Thankfully, in the case of Manos: The Hands of Fate, we don’t have to worry about that. The 1966 movie, with a whopping score of 1.9/10 on IMBD and 0%…
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Explore the dense world of Spirited Away in 8-bit theater

“I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners.” – Hayao Miyazaki The above quote could easily apply to any of the stories woven by Miyazaki and his animation studio, Studio Ghibli, which have been formative to so many people across the globe. Visual artists in particular have used the storyteller’s colorful worlds to inform their own original work and tributes. From woodblock prints to art nouveau, artists have translated the Japanese filmmaker’s stories into other…
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A pair of Dutch artists have created 8-bit food

There’s obsessive portion control as a dietary practice, and then there’s millimeter-perfect portion control as an aesthetic statement. “Cubes,” the latest project by Dutch artists Lenert and Sander, falls into the latter category.  The artists responded to a commission for a food spread in de Volkskrant by cutting 98 pieces of food into 2.5cm cubes. Though these cubes are precisely cut, they have little to do with traditional culinary knifework. Lenert and Sander have not produced an oversized brunoise of Wagyu beef, purple potato, and endive. Rather, the pair has turned foodstuffs into a sort of geometric artwork wherein each…