Video game ANSI art: supplemental

Due to the surprising and quick response on the somewhat unprecedented material in the previous post ("here", I thought, "is something you can't find at any other blog." Probably for good reason!) I figured I may as well share the rest of it. Yes, I must confess -- I didn't just plunge my hand down a hole and pull up a fistful of gold nuggets. I wanted you all to think, "oh, textmode art was so cool and sophisticated!" but really, that would be fudging the history of things. A lot of it was off-tinted, malproportioned (heh, even worse than the Image comics source material!), and basically... not being the best representation of the source material. These were typically released in smaller art groups whose names you wouldn't have been conversant with, and -- worst of all -- made with TheDraw for PD (public domain) BBSes whose denizens were like the inhabitants of Plato's cave, grateful for any ANSI art on their boards without realising they were just looking at silhouettes of the real thing flooding in from outside. (Except in this case, outside was "the underground".)

So here's the stuff I filtered out, filling in the rest of the picture -- but hey, the gunk at the bottom of the drain can still be of interest! To be fair, I will make myself the first lamb led to the slaughter. This was an idea sketched out by Talonswift, a creative Unitarian lad who taught us the Chairman's game and is quite handy with a pencil and paper, having somewhat fallen down the rabbit hole of the Life Drawing Cartel. Like any editor, I liked the taste better after I peed in it; Mistigris had closed up shop with some loose ends hanging around, so in the spirit of Mistigris' annual "joke packs" in April (for April Fool's, artists would release amateurish works in formats in which they were not practiced) this piece was submitted to the artscene's Dada outlet, The Project, and released in 1999.

A fugue on a similar theme, but this time rendered by someone who was capable of drawing ANSI well if he so chose -- the elusive Spirit of Illusion from our very own area code 604, an enigmatic character who somehow managed to transcend local artgroup politics. Instead of rendering a masterpiece he felt playful, and this time he instead decided to filter his subjects through a haze of the Game Boy's original pea soup display -- a platform exclusive wherein Mario and Megaman crossed paths for the first time.

And here's an earlier work by him -- you see, with practice, folks can manage to pull themselves out of the ghetto of being bad artists -- later they just have the option to exercise the commission of bad art. The subject is Konami's Sparkster! Lightnin' Hopins was legendary in the 604 -- there were warez boards (such as this one) so elite, they had zero local members with the exception of the SysOp, and were used solely by long-distance couriers from faraway places as waypoints to drop their 0-3 day goods.

Here are two further charmingly naive (and, dare I say, PD) takes on the MegaMan character.

And another charming piece -- a coloured ASCII rendition of a round of Pac-Man. This is real outsider art -- work in this format was never seen in any artpacks:

Now here's something nicer on the eyes: yes, you saw Jed's Sonic preciously, but this must be the earlier version -- as in the games, that one had him indicating "2" with a hand gesture, while here he is extending only one finger. (Is it just me, or does it look like his middle finger? Easy there, Sonic!)

And another Sonic, this one in coloured ASCII art -- but reflecting the h/p/a mentality of the underground cyber-scene, a d00b-smoking "Chronic the Hemp-hog". Of course. Making this would have been so much work, and sadly I'm not sure that it was entirely worthwhile. But we must all develop our skills with exercises of one sort or another!

The first of those two Sonics was by the great ANSImator Jed, and he takes us from the mascot of one 16-bit home console, the Sega Genesis, to another -- Hudson's B.C. Kid, aka Bonk!

This is just a problem of character design: it's a very faithful rendition of Wonder Boy, circa Sega Master System. The crapulence of the end product is not the artist's fault, except perhaps for their choice in subject.

This could more fairly be described as a case of operator error -- what you are intended to be looking at is a portrayal of Raiden, from Mortal Kombat.

This one isn't so bad -- you saw one of Jinx's MegaMen above, and now here's his Luigi:

BBS folks never forgot their roots -- most of us were MS-DOSsing like it was going out of fashion, but there were parallel clusters of boards run on Amigas, Atari machines, and even a few Commodore 64s into the '90s, running the BBS off of one floppy drive with all the user data on the other! This next piece isn't game-inspired, but a logo for a board named after its technological predecessor: Atari Blues. (Note to self: potential album title someday.)

And while paying homage to the digital companies who populated our cyber-landscape, here's one final piece -- a rendition of a company logo itself inspired by nature, the famous "Half Dome" in Yosemite National Park. The company was, of course, Sierra On-Line -- the image repurposed to promote a BBS named, in homage, "High Sierra".

A belated birthday gift, plus a pile of video game ANSI art

Some time ago I was reading up on the CRPG Addict playing through Dungeon Campaign, and upon seeing its start screen, a light bulb went off over my head: that's ANSI! Well, yes and no -- the Apple II's screen had a weird split-mode that enabled graphics display in the upper portion of the screen, leaving 4 lines on the bottom for text. Just perfect for illustrated text adventures like Mystery House! But I didn't come to this conclusion immediately -- first I popped open PabloDraw, the latest incarnation of an ANSI art editor my group Mistigris first released back in the mid-'90s, and whiled away a few hours trying to eyeball the chunky source material and approximate a conversion to actual textmode.

Judging by my notes, this happened some time after my birthday, as it was lumped in with mention of a belated birthday present I'd received -- a copy of the Dark Domains DVD from no less than RaDMaN, founder of ACiD! (ACiD, for those not in the know, was essentially the first -- or at least pre-eminent -- ANSI art group during the art form's peak period in those halcyon '90s. For a time I, based on a "how StUdLy are you?" quiz I published in my school newspaper, was the group's secretary. This not only gave me elite kudos and access to late-night conference calls of dubious provenance, but it turns out was also responsible for my graduating high school, yielding an adult's signature endorsing my extra-curricular activities in fulfilment of our work experience requirement. But I digress.) This DVD was jam-packed with all the onetime contents of the Artpacks Archive FTP site ACiD had maintained, after Trixter (who would end up creating MobyGames) gave the pirate-associated ANSI artpacks the heave ho from the demoscene-themed Hornet archive. (Since, after all, the loaders and intros epitomizing the demo art were in no way linked to the cracking and couriering scene, he exhaustingly sarcased.)

(No privacy violation -- it's been long enough, that that's now my old address! Yeesh!)

The ANSI art format was painfully limited, but it was the right material for its time -- an effective beautification scheme for dial-up BBSes at middling modem speeds, in an age when downloading a Cindy Crawford swimsuit .GIF might take an hour. A focal medium of expression for thousands of teenaged boys (and a few notable exceptions, of both gender and age), it could be used to express anything -- but mostly derived its influences from graffiti (in its typography) and comic books (in its subjects) -- tragically, the stylish launch titles of Image, some of the most highly-polished turds to ever grace the page. But... I digress!

Still in, if admittedly stepping out from, a pixelart era, the pseudo-pixels (tall rectangles in the default MS-DOS screen mode of 80x25) of ANSI art also made it an effective medium for revisiting video game sprite artwork -- and of course, given that access to the subterranean river of wareZ was a critical motivating factor for many aspiring ANSI artists, the subject was never far from their minds in any case.

My birthday is rapidly approaching (you may be hearing about my drumming up the next instalment of my retro game parties), hence the raw material for this post must have been sitting around collecting dust for the better part of nine months now. (Sorry for dropping off the face of the blogosphere in the middle of my D&D spree -- things have been hairy lately and a breath of fresh air will probably make this blog more of a joyous undertaking than another dreary responsibility.) Though my computer at the time didn't have an optical media drive of any kind, I was still able to avail myself of the web interface to the artpacks archive at sixteencolors.net and dig up some interesting specimens of video game art, ANSI style, for your enjoyment and edification!

Anything visual was fair game for conversion to ANSI art, as my opening indicated, though certain (chest-heaving) themes would prove more popular than others. Here, to set the scene, a couple of specimens from the visual vocabulary of the company Konami:

Here, tropes from Super Mario Bros. are used as set decoration for an infofile, describing group membership. This rendition employs the block characters that made ANSI so special, but eschews its minimal-amazing palette of 16 colours (and endless shades between).

Now we have a piece by Jed of ACiD, an endlessly talented individual who made his mark as a master of ANSImation, or animated ANSI art. This piece is not a specimen of that black art (and indeed I am not sure how one would even go about embedding such materials into web pages) but it remains a good example of his style -- unsophisticated, but very effective. Sonic the Hedgehog is an excellent choice of subject for this piece, presumably celebrating a warez-couriering group named after the speed with which they deliver the goods.

A second piece by Jed, this one features the titular caveman of the video game Trog. Jed was also a deft hand at "toon" shading, which you can see in the typography here, with its reliance on going from a high-intensity version of a colour in the foreground to a low-intensity version in the background, ultimately suggesting a pseudo 3-D presentation -- a stiff order at this brutally low resolution.

Now on to another ACiD member, here Kingpin delivers a small-scale scene of Ken from Street Fighter 2 beating up a BBS's name. You can see how details fall by the wayside as you try to fit in full-body subjects on a single screen, ultimately outlines only suggesting, rather than depicting, particulars.

The counterpart to Street Fighter and the flip side of ANSI art, this is a piece of coloured ASCII art representing a portion of the Mortal Kombat logo. This style relies heavily on negative space.

Here's one from my own group's vaults, an ad for Evil Intentions with a Moogle from Final Fantasy 3, by Halaster once (and again) of Fire. Aesthetics are moving on from toon here, this piece demonstrating "goop".

And another take on a Moogle, this is uncoloured ASCII art from a truly enormous colly (a digest of sorts, etymologically derived from... collage?) that was in a much later Mistigris pack. Computers can automatically generate ASCII art of this style, but not with such crisp edges at such a low resolution. That requires the hands of a genius and the brain of a madman!

Another goop tour-de-force, Hennifer actually distributed primers on ANSI art. The small-scale subject here is of course Doug TenNapel's character Earthworm Jim, his main creation fresh after departing Virgin Games after animating the well-received sprites on the Genesis version of Disney's Aladdin there. This work was probably more creatively satisfying.

Another take on Earthworm Jim and his nemesis, PsyCrow, here Snake Grunger employs ANSI shading to suggest greater texture than likely exists in the original source material. (And if my stack of Nintendo Powers weren't in deep storage, I would take out the copy to check!)

Skipping ahead a decade, we find that even though MS-DOS and the BBS have been long since left behind, artists are continuing to flex their creating muscles in this technologically defunct medium with more contemporary subjects -- here, the video game Red Dead Redemption (aka Grand Theft Horse!) on a somewhat grander scale.

Just a few more pieces. This is more of an interpretation than a direct translation of an image, a highly non-standard work of coloured ASCII art (using filler and edge characters not often seen) showing us Cats from Zero Wing of "all your base" fame. This is by a character who goes by the nickname of Konami (video game much?), who I had the fortune to spend a little time with while passing through Toronto in 2002.

And bringing us right to the present, another work by an artist I've met, this one Mongi from Sweden, during my return from the 1999 Assembly demoparty in Helsinki. Back then, he was purely a high-resolution artist, but I suppose now that the ANSI medium is totally backward, it can be revisited, like needlepoint, beadwork or mosaics, as a minimalist canvas for bonus challenge. The subject is a fellow Scandinavian, ripped from today's smartphones: the main Angry Bird.

No artscene revue would be complete without at least one member of the RIPscrip species, a vector illustration format (which documented not output, but drawing instructions -- so viewers would see every line drawn in fast forward, every step taken toward the final product). This one was also released in my group Mistigris, featuring ironically a game which could be more effectively represented in textmode characters than most: the roguelike NetHack! At the time it was pretty unheard of to distribute computer artscene pieces that weren't ads for some BBS or another, but we didn't always adhere to the status quo in Mist. (Also, ours were some of the last gasp of BBSes! What do you promote when all the boards are gone?) The artist is Happyfish, who is basically the only person I know who has ascended in NetHack. This is one of her characters.

This October will mark the 20th anniversary of the first release by Mistigris, and as you can see, I'm warming up to celebrate it.

"A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure" part 5, 1981.

Another weekend, another instalment of the comic strip advertisements for the D&D pen and paper game... this one featuring the first episode of a new adventure for our crew!

OUR HEROS RELAX AT GAVIN'S INN AFTER RESCUING INDEL THE ELF FROM CERTAIN DEATH!
S: THAT WAS A CLOSE CALL EH VALERIUS?
V: NOT NEARLY AS CLOSE AS OUR FIRST ADVENTURE SAREN.
G: IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY WHEN WE WERE INTRODUCED BY MY MENTOR, GRINDAL...
G: (... A HEALER, AN ELF AND A FIGHTER. THEY WILL BE YOUR COMPANIONS ON THIS QUEST GRIMSLADE.)
"WE HAD TO OVERCOME MANY PERILS TO FIND..."
"THE FABULOUS HEART OF MEKRON!"
G: (YOU HAVE ALL DONE WELL! YOU WILL MAKE A FINE WIZARD ONE DAY, GRIMSLADE!
JUST THEN AT THE INN!...
G: HELLLP MEEE!
V: WHO?
I: URK!
THUD!
G: IT IS I...
S: GRINDAL!
G: GASP!!

Sorry for the dip in activity this week ... I've got no lack of posts to make, but the sameness of my current backlog is proving somewhat numbing. I suspect I'll be dialing down the D&D theme for a while shortly. Cheers!

"Shadow Sorcerer", 1991.

I gush over Westwood's Forgotten Realms AD&D games for SSI, but vomit all over U.S. Gold's Dragonlance AD&D games for them. Was it the companies' different corporate cultures that resulted in such a strong divergence of opinion? Is the problem just the subject matter -- as with Dragonstrike, could Westwood have made better Dragonlance games than U.S. Gold did? These and other questions... have no answer.

A whole new look!
A whole new way
to play!

SHADOW SORCERER
AN ANIMATED FANTASY ADVENTURE

SHADOW SORCERER combines elements of role-playing with strategy, exploration and animated action. It's an exciting new way to play computer AD&D fantasy gaming!

Control four characters at the same time -- even during fully-animated real-time combat! All in 3-D isometric perspective!

Select your party from 16 different heroes, each with pre-made attributes. You've got nothing but trouble ahead: hundreds of refugees who desperately need your help to find safe haven.

Strange monsters that inhabit the vast wilderness, caverns and dungeons. An army of Draconians led by a red dragon!

When the spells and weapons start flying, you'll love the simple "point-and-click" interface!

SHADOW SORCERER. It's a whole new experience in fantasy gaming!

[screenshot]
Control four characters at once even during real-time combat!
[screenshot]
Play in the DRAGONLANCE game world -- in 3-D isometric view!
[screenshot]
One of the many colorful characters who can help you on your quest.

The screenshots don't entirely sell me, and the captions just reiterate points made earlier in the copy. I see an isometric view reminiscent of Populous or (if you like) Knight Lore, but (I bet) less fun. The bottom screenshot tells me that this is a game for babies -- this game's Tom Bombadil moment, I suppose, a mismatch with its intended tone of refugee salvation.

They keep harping on its "animated" nature. "Animated action"? Is it possible to have an action game with no animation? Still Life: The Arcade Shooter. (I suppose you can have non-animated sprite movement, like eg. the textmode sprites in ZZT.) Touting a combination of role-playing, strategy, exploration and action concerns me, colouring with all the crayons but ending up with brown rather than rainbow. But no, they reassure me, "[i]t's an exciting new way to play computer AD&D fantasy gaming!" More fun than Pool of Radiance? The box isn't gold, to that's not a good sign. Here's the deal, U.S. Gold -- this is your third kick at the can, and your previous two were duds. Why should I trust you now? Well, they did change their approach -- this game is a plot sequel to Dragons of Flame, but the gameplay is very, very different.

Then we get this shopping list: control 4 characters simultaneously -- fun in Syndicate, but this is no Syndicate -- during fully-animated (there they go again) real-time (uh-oh) combat -- sounds like a headache to me! -- in 3-D isometric perspective ... wihch is a design decision, not a selling point. Congratulations, SSI, you've compounded my concern with more concern. I suppose they're just trying their hardest to talk up the game they have to sell, rather than coming up with misleading or deceptive claims about it.

Why would I want to select from a pool of characters with pre-made attributes? Then I can't cheat and give them all 18s! (Not such an egregious cheat, since the AD&D games are still quite difficult even with stat-pumped characters.) I suppose this gives the game more of a "turn on and play" feel without needing to go through tedious character generation? Here we have a third concern: hundreds of refugees desperately need my help. That tells me: "you will need to protect countless NPCs with no sense of self-preservation." Maybe it's more fun than it sounds, as broken "accompany and protect" missions weren't yet such an industry cliche at this point. Then I start getting more interested: strange monsters, caverns, dungeons. (Am I leading refugees through dungeons? Doesn't seem the most prudent...) The army of Draconians sounds like an un-fun pain in the ass, but I concede to interest in the encounter with the red dragon. I like that GUIs were sufficiently novel in 1991 that the simple "point-and-click" interface warrants mention and quotation marks rather than just being something gamers swim through like fish in water.

You know what I don't need, Larry Elmore? Dragons with fins for ears, spikes on their nose, and hipster beards. Feathers on dinosaurs I've come to terms with, but when you start making my dragons scruffy and shaggy, you cross a line! I do dig the chain mail over Kitiara's background helmet's mouth -- offering extra protection in an opposite fashion to Lord Soth's lackadaisical helm. I can see that the screenshots very deftly erase Tasslehoff Burrfoot the kender from the scene -- probably an improvement. Now can we get rid of Tanis Half-Elven's hipster First Nations feather earrings? Tika Waylan is looking like she just stumbled off the SnarfQuest backlot, and Laurana has about as much dignity as one can muster with slightly crossed eyes.

"Death Knights of Krynn", 1991.

Critical Dragonlance failure! This ad artwork contains no dragons nor any lances! This ad is actually for a game from the SkullyKnight campaign setting. (Soth was eventually relocated to Ravenloft, where he makes quite a bit more sense.)

DEATH KNIGHTS OF KRYNN
The incredible sequel to CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN!

LORD SOTH HAS THROWN DOWN THE GAUNTLET OF CHALLENGE!

It has been but one short year since the Champions of Krynn claimed victory over the massed forces of evil. Now, the Lord of the Death Knights, Soth himself, is preparing to wreak havoc in an eruption of evil such as Krynn has never witnessed!

As members of the Special Solamnic Order of the Champions of Krynn, you and your party stand as the only force capable of answering Soth's deadly challenge -- and living to tell of it!

DEATH KNIGHTS OF KRYNN takes the award-winning game system used in CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN to new heights! Now, characters transferred from CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN can keep their money and items. Higher character levels, new monsters, new spells and enhanced combat aiming make for AD&D fantasy role-playing beyond anything you've ever experienced!

It's nice for them to tell us precisely which variety of gauntlet has been thrown down; casting the gauntlet after all is such an open-ended phrase that it could imply just about anything.

The party is "the only force capable of answering Soth's deadly challenge -- and living to tell of it!", but there are plenty of other forces who could answer it and die in the process. It's a sign of the scrupulosity of the Solamnic Order that they wouldn't send in troubleshooters they didn't expect to fully survive, just to get them out of their bind.

Apparently this game takes the system of its predecessor further. Now, they can keep their money and items. (Then, there was no prior game for them to inherit goods from. That's not a failure of the earlier game: that's just what it means to be the first in a trilogy.) "Higher character levels, new monsters, new spells" sum up the usual total of improvements, plus the curiously particular "enhanced combat aiming", which I guess reflects a concern that didn't crop up in the Realms-based Gold Box games. Unlike earlier ads, they're not boasting the incredible graphics of the game's 3-D adventuring environment, so I guess they learned something.

Cf. my horse question from the Silver Blades ad post: these are clearly demonic night-mares, and not just because they are so described in the bottom-left screenshot: their eyes glow red and their faces are sinisterly wrinkled. They only dine on Hell oats and apples of discord in their asbestos stable.

OK, undead dragon screenshot: I appreciate that with no flesh on your bones, you're considerably lighter than you were in life -- but with no membrane stretched between your wingbones, with what are you flying? A: magic. Superman's cape doesn't make him fly either, it just helps him to look good when he does.

I've always dug the way Soth's helmet design affords him no nose protection. No nose = no protection needed there! I guess his sinister red eyes are just floating in a giant collapsed sinus cavity. His companions appear to have cloned Darth Vader's lightsaber, but his own mace seems to be secreting some sinister incense like a really evil censer.

What do you think motivates a skeletal warrior in a fantasy realm? Hedonistic pursuits are right out, with the possible exception of pure sadism. What will a skeleton do with riches? (Far-right skelly is wearing a bangle around his upper arm-bone. Bet the bony ladies will be all over that. What? he is a bony lady? Awkward! I should have looked at the hips.) Then again, I suppose it's not like a dragon can take his hoard down to the corner store either: hi, I'd like a carton of smokes and the March issue of PlayDrake.

"Champions of Krynn", 1990.

(Whoops, missed a 1990 D&D title!) OK, enough messing around. Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds had been moving more units than the rest of SSI's product line altogether (that's right: more than Battles of Napoleon and Germany Turns East combined), so it's time to cut their losses from the weird Dragonlance action-adventures and give the world a tactical Dragonlance Gold Box CRPG instead. I don't know for a fact that things were informed by those particular motivations, but this seems conspicuously follow-uppy.

CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN

The first fantasy role-playing epic set in the AD&D DRAGONLANCE game world!

CHAMPIONS OF KRYNN improves on the award-winning game system used in SSI's mega-hits POOL OF RADIANCE and CURSE OF THE AZURE BONDS. For the first time ever on your computer, you'll enjoy fantasy role-playing adventure in the legendary AD&D game world of Krynn! Your quest: Defeat a vile plot by the forces of evil to establish the Dark Queen, Takhisis, as undisputed ruler of Krynn!

Improves on the award-winning game system used in SSI's mega-hits? (Mega-hits? And which awards?) This game adds complexity: Dragonlance races and classes, plus tidal magic influence caused by the movements of Krynn's moons. Do those, however, make for a better game? As much richness as kender, gully dwarves and gnomes add to the novels, improvements they may lend the CRPG conversion remain unclear. "For the first time ever on your computer, you'll enjoy fantasy role-playing adventure in the legendary AD&D game world of Krynn!" Have they already so baldly conceded that the action-adventures were no fantasy role-playing adventures at all?

Free poster? Sign me up! Dragonlance's flying citadels seem painfully derived from surreal paintings by Magritte. You know what's truly pathetic? Riding away from a flying, dragon-swarming citadel on horseback. Looking at the screenshot we can see an artist's interpretation of Krynn's dragons hilariously conforming to breed characteristics spelled out in the campaign-agnostic Monster Manual of the prior edition, designating Gold Dragons as in the Asiatic vein.

Where is the light source in this painting, anyhow?

"A Dungeons & Dragons Adventure" part 4, 1981.

My initial intention was to keep the D&D video game posts for the weekdays and these less labour-intensive related D&D comic-book-style ads for the weekends, but I think this is my first opportunity to actually make it happen this way. I don't have much qualifying context for these ads, merely transcriptions -- and lemme tell you, once Google Images has OCR capability, this blog is toast!

DEEP IN THE DUNGEON, INDEL THE ELF COMES FACE TO FACE WITH A HUGE DRAGON!
D: GREETINGS, MORTAL WORM!
I: ULP!

WHILE ELSEWHERE HIS COMPANIONS SEARCH FOR HIM...
S: MY POWERS TELL ME THAT HE'S BEHIND THIS DOOR.

V: THEN WE MUST GET THROUGH!

A MIGHTY BLOW FROM THE FIGHTER'S SHOULDER OPENS THE DOOR WITH A CRASH TO REVEAL...
G: -- INDEL!
G: GOOD WORK, VALERIUS!

V: NOW IT'S YOUR TURN, DRAGON!

D: THE GREAT SWORD NARIL!
D: STAY YOUR HAND, WARRIOR! YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS MAY LEAVE IN PEACE!

I: WHAT A DAY!
S: COME! GAVIN'S INN HAS A WARM FIRE TO RELAX BY.
THE END
WATCH FOR INDEL AND HIS FRIENDS IN UPCOMING DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS ADVENTURES--!

Did I mention GOG's D&D video game sale? For the next two days, you can get basically $100 worth of games for $20... the more you get, the steeper the savings. Times like this I wish I'd followed through on my inquiries about compensation for referral traffic to them, since now I'm just shilling pro bono! Still, it's acutely relevant and I like to think it's of interest to my, er, stonily silent readership.