"Hey Toejam!" "Whattup, Earl?" "Check it out! I'mma pose for a piece of ANSI art while dabbing to these sick grooves!"
Yes, my friends, it's time for another installment of Video Game Textmode Art. Now, where do you go when you're looking for ANSI art of Sega Genesis hip-hop heroes Toejam & Earl? This is a trick question: even supposing our regular haunts of sixteencolours.net and textmod.es are both feeling well enough today to serve up requests, you won't find it released in a traditional artscene context. Instead, its discovery was a happy accident at a spin-off from the artscene, that digital art gallery portfolio site known as DeviantArt, home to endless quantities of Bronie and/or erotic furry fanart. Since they offer ANSI/ASCII art as one category in their filing system, it turns out that quite a bit of modern textmode artwork has gravitated there, much of it either in an historical or a totally outsider vein... some of it dealing with video game themes such as I cover on this beat. (The above piece was drawn by one
Elph.) So here today I have for you the top gamey pickings from my poring over the top 2000 returns of ANSI/ASCII its endless scroll dished up.
Xbox 360
We begin with the hardware, the fundamental factor without which no video gaming is possible. Here Mooks13 drew an Xbox360 suffering from the dreaded GAME OVER affliction known as the Red Ring of Death. (I'm not sure what's up with Blogger here -- I instruct it to show images at full size, and then we get this "click to see this large picture" nonsense.)
A little more classic, here's a mint NES controller drawn by Xanta16. (You can tell that it's mint because of the absence of greasy orange Cheeto crumb accumulations in the crevices.)
Speaking of "classic", here's a panel from a webcomic drawn in the roguelike style by nupanick1. You may not realise that you have what it takes in you to draw textmode art, but if you can string together a few lines of octothorpes with an @ in the middle, you are already a Hack cartographer par excellence! (And here you thought you were just a hack.)
We saw a bunch of these last time, but here's another excellent specimen of its kind: a big, bold and colourful celebration of Taito's Bubble bobble, drawn by skizo.
Enthusiasts of textmode art everywhere lost out when classic-contemporary ANSI artist
bym (Big Yellow Man) died in 2014 in a freak accident. But as the man was rigorous about mirroring his creations on DeviantArt, it was a chance to once again immerse myself in his skilled works -- and marvel at just how many of them contained references to video games! The patron saints of this blog series are Reset Survivor and Konami -- thankfully both still among the living. But a third empty chair is at the games table. Anyhow, here he drew a dragon demonstrating to some Bomberman personages just what pyrotechnics could be.
Hadoc, have you been tampering with the retractor servomotors in MegaMan's leg again?
A rough early work by cccfire (who has gone on to far greater things since!), this piece explores several aspects of the game Portal.
And there's another Portal piece, by ansicat: the scope is narrower, limiting itself to an exploration of the weighted companion cube, so the focus is necessarily a little tighter.
We've seen
earlier in this series a riotous celebration of the perhaps underrated Pokemon Mudkip -- well, here he is again, in effect and in progress in ASCII form as drawn by ansi86.
The picture is nothing special -- I mean, it's very nice original artwork of a textmode dragon, but as far as our specific theme of videogame-derived art goes, it's a non-starter. But wow, look at that font -- the name of the BBS advertised, "Dragon's Lair", is of course the same as that Don Bluth-animated arcade coin-op classic... and adapts its logo perfectly to the strange new blocky medium!
Anakhronizein is most definitely one of the two flying Volk brothers from 8bitMUSH (also the textmode training ground of the above cccfire), and drew ANSI renditions of these three monsters inspired by their depictions as sprites in Final Fantasy games (
such as you've seen here before): that was a wolf, here is a Medusa, and then there are three palette-swapped versions of flans as depicted in FF X-2.
This bad dead dude from the Badlands is an adaptation of
Jeff Easley's box art for the SSI/Westwood 1st-person CRPG Eye of the Beholder. Some liberties are taken, but isn't that always necessarily the case in textmode matters? (Well, no: sit tight for the shell script pictures of sprites from pixelart games.)
But first let's change gears with a most likely machine-generated (they don't much care about the finer points of how the sausage is made over at DA) ASCII art logo by pxkittylovexq for the Sega Saturn game Nights:
Now today the big story really is terminal scripts that work like and look like ANSI art, but aren't ANSI as we know it. But it's a big tent, and I for one am a lumper rather than a splitter, so let's welcome this stuff right on in here. hdquote opens with a pair of pixelart sprites from Cave Story, the first of which (Quote) is just getting warmed up and the second of which (Curly Brace) is in full ANSI-esque effect!
And since this is now the preferred medium for indie hipsterism, how about a nice hot helping of Super Meat Boy?
Of course, it doesn't have to be rendered as ANSI to make an impact: Simon Belmont is left (by emgrte) as ASCII here and loving it!
The terminal shell scripting continues apace, hdquote working on a Pac-Man in progress here...
... and what naturally follows? Wait, don't answer that question, the answer is of course: a ghost! (But just which ghost is it? Thank you, Wikipedia, for keeping tabs on all the really important details... unlike BBS door games, this is totally notable!: "Kinky -- also called Kinzo -– a yellow Ghost that only appeared in Pac-Man Arrangement.")
But the Pac wouldn't be held back -- here's perhaps his smallest ANSI art appearance ever, a tiny excerpt from a larger piece by our friend bym discussed above:
And a more substantial piece: "Usual Suspects" by m00ks13:
And because one oldschool turn deserves another, here's another hdquote script-produced nod to Space Invaders:
And a tiny "Space Invaders" ANSI interlude by thykka as we move along...
Here we go, scripts can also be used to render a triforce from the Legend of Zelda games...
... an act that might, sometimes, be preferable to manually drawing a logo celebrating the game, as xanta16 has done here:
Ideal would be a hand-drawn ANSI art picture of Link by a skilled & talented master of the form, such as avg offers here:
Yes, my friends, we're out of the trough and into the victory lap! Since I haven't played it yet, I failed to pick up on this Blocktronics Mass Effect ANSI by Aaron Frick:
I only previously knew of a single Titanfall ANSI drawn by artscene alumnus (and now Titanfall dev -- this is no fan tribute, it comes from about as close to the horse's mouth as one can get)
Jon "Slothy" Shiring. I'm very glad I found it (in the unlikeliest of places!) because I like it quite a bit more than the other one I saw:
Last but not least, we return to the source -- not just a subject of extreme and textmode antiquity, but also from a vintage creator of textmode art.
You previously saw him on this very blog cranking out enormous quantities of Iron Maiden-inspired ANSI art circa 1992 as The Necromancer, but he is back, he has found DeviantArt, he has uploaded many of his old ANSIs there, and a "recent" film has moved him to step back in the saddle: the film is GET LAMP by the same Jason Scott who runs (also the subject of
a previous installment of VG textmode art) textfiles.com (this vintage computing ghetto really is a small world, isn't it?), a film which makes as its subject the text adventure, specifically as perfected in its commercial era by the company Infocom, purveyors of eg. Zork. (Incidentally, before GET LAMP, Jason Scott also made The BBS documentary, including an entire section entitled
ARTSCENE, dedicated to those old bones I spend so much time disturbing here. One of my teenaged compositions even appears in it briefly!)
Did I say "last"? Please excuse me, I couldn't pass up including this piece -- a crazy ANSI art adaptation by deaconpenguin of kraAaZy sprite art from the SNES cult favorite Earthbound:
And that's all for now, video game textmode fans! But fear not: I still have a dozen or so posts's worth of this stuff hanging around in the queue -- in time I will be discharging all of it, but also visiting other related subjects dear to my heart. This one just, er, jumped the queue due to the quantity of curious and quality material, vintage and current, that presented itself relevant to this series. It came unexpected to the door and knocked so very hard I simply couldn't say no!
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