While I've been sweating away investigating other alternate niches of video game-themed fanart and sorting and categorizing them for a more curatorial kind of presentation to you all, new finds -- increasingly, of genuinely new ANSI artwork -- have been piling up in a scattered, haphazard fashion. I don't have appropriate posts-in-progress to parachute them into, but am I supposed to just refrain from sharing this fascinating and excellent new work, when I could instead be promoting and praising it, encouraging its artists to do more? Yeah, you know how I roll.
So. There was recently a new Blocktronics ANSI artpack release, "Year of the Block". Reset Survivor is usually good for a swell piece or two of video game-related ANSI art in their packs, and here he does not disappoint: We open with a piece depicting Mew from Jet Set Radio. This piece is interesting for its presentation opening in mise-en-abyme style with an emojicon (an emoticon -- think colon-parenthesis smilies -- using Japanese characters) writ en large with textmode characters itself -- only reaffirmed by Reset's trademark "oversized ANSI shading blocks" glitches.
R5 delivers with a subsequent love letter to Macross, which has been here excerpted to include a panel
apparently directly derived from the 1985 Famicom game
Chō Jikū Yōsai Macross.
Hot stuff, right? OK, let's cool things down a little bit with a stock TheDraw font and a 1995 visit to a legendary Sierra Online protagonist reputed for selling more hint books than games, Larry Laffer:
OK, where were we? I was touting improbable new works of excellence in the ANSI medium by new artists. Here I present a suite of works by Luke Volk, who we saw
once previously illustrating some bizarre incidental artwork from a game. He's doubled down on game subjects as his theme of choice, apparently.
Quite similar to the earlier piece, this is "meat" from "Monster Hunter". But these pieces get more interesting...
Luke here makes an ANSI of a Metroid coloured according to the conventions of
the Grateful Dead skull, a curious mash-up to be sure!
Luke visits, as have many before him, the seemingly endless (I see the quote "720 revealed species") well of Pokémon characters. This one is a
Hoothoot.
A classic here, Cutie from Jaleco's 1989 game Astyanax, rendered with a bit of help from some unusual ASCII characters. (
Compare and contrast!)
Finally, this character is quite recent, by game-characters-drawn-in-ANSI standards -- Ryfia from 2009's Arc Rise Fantasia for the Wii, with ASCII art highlighting for fine nuances. Keep up the good work, Luke!
A couple more "classic" pieces by established artists from back in the day, then I'll end on a couple more new works. These next two are by the talented Swede Mongi, who we've seen pwning these pages before. The first is still another take on Steve Purcell's demented duo of crimefighters Sam & Max, from back in 1997...
... and considerably more recently, artwork by him inspired by 2012's Battlefield 3.
This is a piece by a new artist, @pixelgoth, who has just burst apparently fully-formed into the scene, debuting at the last minute in the last Blocktronics pack with a number of inspired pieces with what could be described as a fresh new style, synthesizing ANSI and ASCII art with some dark themes. This piece, the only game-themed one in their body of work, was not included in that release, so I am thrilled to here share with you what might be one of the only pieces of "Number Munchers" (1990, MECC) fan art out there. This artist is currently crowdfunding to support their new choice of direction in a pixelart game developing city-of-residence relocating drive about which you can find out more
over here:
And finally, a new piece of textmode art on a classic game that was just re-released, "remastered".
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