May the 4th [be with you] means it's time for another (as we have done not once but twice before) celebration of all things Star Wars in the realm of textmode art! People were literally drawing Star Wars ANSI art this month, but it's part of a surprisingly long tradition dating all the way back to the release of the original movie in 1977 -- the same year that saw the release of the holy trinity of home computers, the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and the Radio Shack TRS-80. That's right: for as long as home computers have existed, there has been Star Wars fandom exercised on these machines, specifically celebrated through the medium of textmode art. Isn't that wild?!
As we have seen, their primitive screens' small text mode resolutions didn't leave much possibility for the output of detailed textmode art, but fortunately these creative nerds had other canvases for the expression of their genius: as with later ANSI art scrollers, they prepared tall, thin posters formatted to be output on printer paper, generated through instructions stored on paper punch tape and transmitted not through modems but over the radio waves through RTTY (radioteletype) at around 45 baud. Now, as fascinating as all this is, it's a digression from the main attraction: the pretty pictures. So without further ado, a bold, brassy adaptation of the Star Wars theatrical poster:
As mentioned in the attribution on the bottom, the original design apparently dates to a 1977 People's Computers magazine listing I wouldn't mind learning a little more about, and was adapted by Dale for TTY in 1979. I was born in 1979! This awesome ASCII art (sorry: TTY art) is older than I am! I had to manually groom this listing's output from its original form sitting out in the open on textfiles.com waiting for someone with a very particular set of retro interests to stop by and shake the pile until something interesting fell out... the original file includes what look like overprint areas to achieve new layers of texture not achievable through single runs of ASCII characters. I don't have an easy way of synchronizing the layers, so I just trimmed them out... but know that these specimens have been modified by me for your viewing convenience. (This one had the extra layers tacked on to the side, but most of them looked twice as tall as they ought to -- almost certainly, what I was seeing was alternating lines of overprint instructions. They are now the correct height, but somewhat texture-desaturated.) That said, on we go: let's look at the rogue's gallery for the first movie.
Baby steps! The first of these antagonists to trouble young Master Luke, here are two Jawas, or at least -- two sets of glowing eyes in flowing cowls.
And how better to follow a Stormtrooper than an Imperial military man who can actually land a shot once in a while, Darth Vader:
OK, so these are pretty underwhelming. Let's switch to the Rebels for a little while. May I introduce Princess Leia Organa:
Now, Joseph Campbell's journeying hero on one adventure no one ever predicted -- being diced and spat out of a mechanical typewriter.
It's Luke Skywalker!
But of course Luke would just be a hotshot pilot on the lam in Mos Eisley if not for the mentorship of his father's failed teacher, Obi-Wan "Old Ben" Kenobi, looking here like a bit of the wild-eyed crazy old man the locals must have fully believed him to be:
Now drawing humans is tough, but everyone thinks they can draw a robot. Geometric shapes? Rectangles, triangles, circles... I got it!
Conspicuously everyone tried drawing R2-D2, without a C-3PO to be found. Here's the first...
Now R2-D2... 2!
And one last trip out the TTY device for this tired old R2 unit:
As a bonus, there are a few characters from The Empire Strikes Back. (No ROTJ specimens have washed up in the archives -- perhaps RTTY had faded from fashion by the time episode VI hit the theatres.) Here's Frank Oz finding the middle ground between his Grover and Cookie Monster voices with everyone's favorite little green philosopher, Yoda! It looks a little bit like the Mona Lisa, come to think of it...
Also rocking the green, (and also drawn by "Doug", using the very light "alternating lines" shading) everyone's favorite badass from the original trilogy -- bounty hunter Boba Fett:
And finally, a wholly remarkable rendition (the other styles have successors in the annals of ASCII art, but aesthetically this one -- despite still being drawn by "Doug", who typed the last two -- is way out in left field) of Bespin's Baron Administrator Lando Calrissian:
I know, my blogs really have been thrown under the bus. It seems that these were ways I exorcised frustrated creative energy that might otherwise be expended curating, packaging, distributing and promoting computer artpacks. That wasn't an issue so long as I wasn't in a position to resume my teenage hobby, but since reviving Mistigris in 2014, it slowly but steadily increased its pace with annual reunions, annual joke collections, official discharge of never-released period computer art, re-releases of lost or corrupted material, and finally full-bore monthly artpack releases since October 2016, plus a series of side projects. If we were to chart Mistigris activity against my blog post frequency, I think a clear inverse ratio would leap out. That doesn't mean that I've run out of things to share, just that I don't allow myself enough time to do it anymore. (Having two kids certainly adds another x-factor to these scheduling equations.)
That said, if I don't soon share details of the video gaming / retrocomputing gifts I received for my birthday two weeks ago, I'll soon be out of relevant opportunities to do so entirely... and that would be too bad, because there are some lovely curios here! My thesis is that my wife must love me and know me well, because she made me very happy with a few birthday presents that, to an outsider, might resemble a random assortment of refuse and detritus.
We'll open with a handful of confusingly-priced random Gamecube / Wii titles, picked up at a random thrift store visit while taking the day off work for my actual birthday. My haphazard game acquisition has really slowed down if only because it turned out I was accumulating significant quantities of duplicate games while buying batches and lots. Initially I made a giant list of "All The Video Games That I Own", maintained on my laptop and Dropbox-synched to my phone, so I could always just check before putting money down whether this was money I had already spent... anyway, the high and low of things is that once your game collection exceeds 1000 pieces, most of the items you find live in the wild will be redundant to what you've already accumulated. So mostly the accumulation of little discs has peaked. Every time we advance a generation of technology and I wind up advancing to the previous generation (as I have a rule: don't collect games for systems which you do not own), a cohort of hitherto uncollected (and recently, sold-in-stores) games enter the secondhand space and I get to gobble up another couple hundred, then simmer dozily for the next 5 years or so. But I digress, let's take a look at these games! Anything good here?
OK, a licensed Nickelodeon Gamecube title, a tie-in to a cartoon I've never watched. Why? Ehh, you know -- how good does it have to be to be worth dropping $2 on? I bet I can get $2 worth of enjoyment out of it. If I went to a movie theatre and bought a large popcorn and soda, it might run me $30 and last about two hours. That same $30 would buy me 15 $2 games and I'm sure that's not enough time to even get through all of their opening cinematics and unskippable tutorials, let alone play the five minutes needed to determine conclusively that none of them are worth playing!
A couple of Wii titles also -- one looks like an extension of the GBA's venerable "Advance Wars" series, a cartoony taste of military strategy... the other, a compilation of House of the Dead parts 2 and 3? I can tell you how long it would take me to drop $2 on one of those in the arcade, and -- done. (The only question -- do they require a light gun or is there another ingenious adaptation of the versatile Wiimote? Getting the games for a song is the easy part, but finding time to actually try them out, there's the kicker.)
All right, what else have we got here? Gaming Quiz cards. I can confirm: the questions on these cards pertain to video games. The difficulty level is a tricky thing, because they're all a bit too easy for me while being simultaneously way too hard for anyone else in my household. It's kind of like that time I, a young classicist, got 100% on my Grade 9 Greek Mythology quiz... that everyone else in the class failed. (The teacher applied a bump across the board so everyone passed, resulting in my earning something like 115% on that quiz, or as I like to put it, a grade of A++. Shortly thereafter the teacher took me out of the class and told me to run the school newspaper during that time every week instead. But I digress.) Maybe we can use them at my upcoming gaming party (I hold them twice a year, pull the systems out of storage, we play all day and all night... are you coming? Saturday April 28th!) to settle disputes over whose turn it is to choose which game on the big screen. (Finally, we can stop duelling to resolve these disputes!)
OK! Moving on! Aha: here we have a truly blogworthy specimen: an edible Super Mario Maker maker kit! I was first exposed to this phenomenon in the context of a "most preparation needed ramen" viral video; this follows the script relatively closely -- the package includes various little packets of colouring, emulsifier, etc, and tiny moulds, mixing bowls, stir sticks etc. A very patient person can follow an elaborate set of instructions to manufacture for themselves a few pieces of Mario landscape, and then, when they tire of this diversion, eat them. (Would that all passing fancies were so easily removed from the stage!) Hm, made by the toy company Bandai, which owns the video game company Namco... basically, Pac-Man (already the authority on eating things) is selling you Mario for lunch. The plot thickens...
This is one of those things that would be nothing to the average, normal, healthy person, but to this desperate technological nostalgist is A Big Deal. A thrift store my wife was passing through had some 5.25 inch floppy diskettes on the shelves! Some of them contained video games! (Granted, even application software from the floppy disk era is a joyful curiosity, but documenting it sure is less sexy!) She picked up one for me, and upon seeing how excited I got, went back for the rest of them. I can't even think of how long ago it's been since I had a machine working with a 5.25 disk drive stinking up a drive bay -- I'm thinking perhaps circa 1993 or 1994, contemporary to when I would have been taking my first baby steps online with a borrowed 1200 baud modem. (But if these floppies had been available, I could have saved myself a lot of time downloading at 1200 baud!) One thing for certain: I most definitely have no way of reading their contents today! All of the games in this batch (not pictured: Jill of the Jungle episode 1) had been documented as existing on Mobygames, but for most of them my media scans were the first indication that any of them had ever been distributed on physical media and didn't exist solely as BBS-distributed shareware. Also amusing: the multiple rounds of price tags on the goods, deteriorating slowly but surely through the decades, some shopkeeper unwilling to admit (until apparently liquidating the entire section at a thrift shop) that their unsold merchandise had entered the trough of no value. (The experience is reminiscent of my visit to a Castlegar Radio Shack a few years into the new millennium; amazed to find late-'90s adventure games on the shelves I thought I'd permanently missed the opportunity to play, I hoovered up Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Gabriel Knight 3 and Starship Titanic, and the disbelieving staff kindly knocked a hefty portion off the final price tag after I did them the favour of relieving their burden of unsellable stock. But I digress.)
Did someone hear me say "Radio Shack"? That's today's magic word! It brings us to the coup de grace: the Tandy dedicated chess-playing computer, prepared to deliver me 1987-calibre chess AI if I have a burning need to play a round and no friends. I hope to have this one set up at my vintage gaming party and if we're lucky, we just might make it through a round over the course of the day's events! Truth be known this one probably isn't going to remain in my collection for very long, but learning of its mere existence, let alone in such a concrete fashion, sparks delight. (Really with Tandy, as with Coleco, any technological fruit bore from the tree that sprouted from seeds of leather craft kits is already so delightfully improbable... a chess computer? Why not!? It was the '80s, and any business pivot seemed possible. Just fake it 'til you make it... or break it.)
... which brings us to the present! Sadly, I won't have another slate of presents to report on until Christmas... unless any of my (purely hypothetical, at this point) readers feel like sending me a surprise in the mail or delivering a hopelessly antiquated technological artifact to my doorstep at my upcoming party. But don't feel it's necessary -- I already have enough hopelessly antiquated technological artifacts for all of us to enjoy!
Here we are, the closing minutes of January 2018 and look at me, sitting around with an open tab containing a WIP post describing my Christmas video games haul. It's already kind of pathetically late, but on the other side of this imaginary dividing line of time it will be even more so. Should I even post it or give up on it? Well, I did go to the effort of staging the goods and taking the photos, so I wouldn't want to have wasted my time that way... unless I get to waste your time along for the ride! So please, join me for a whirlwind tour through some curios I received a month and a bit ago! [Edit: making it even more pathetic, the post as completed in the final few minutes of the month failed to successfully post, so here it is bashfully sneaking out in early February.]
There it is, the big haul. Typically there will be a prime batch that makes up the lion's share, orbited by odds and ends, and this motley bunch of gaming paraphernalia lives up to that tradition. Let's take a closer look at some of these curios:
A bootleg NES controller from 2009? Why not! I don't know precisely what the market for such a product looked like then, but I'm glad to find that someone was carrying the torch.
One of these products is genuine and one is a bootleg. You be the judge! Presumably for legal reasons, the shell used on the knockoff doesn't read "GAME BOY" on the plastic, just "BOY", just as the sticker proclaims the game "only for COLOR" rather than "only for GAME BOY COLOR". I have to level with you, I didn't even know that Super Mario Bros. Deluxe was a thang -- given that art and that logo in this context, I expected a Hong Kong Special bearing some only very loose relationship to the license depicted on the sticker.
Plus Pokemon, not bad!
Of the whole initial Genesis generation of Sonic games, I've got to confess that this is one of my favorites for the way it fearlessly eschews convention, mashing-up genres and delivering you a very different kind of game from what you might have expected from the license (making it among my kids' least favorite Sonic games. I guess you need to have grown overfamiliar with the genre tropes before you can delight in their detournement!)
A hefty lot: a shady Atari 2600 of unknown provenance, with no cables... does it even work? Isn't that kind of even beside the point, who wants to play Atari 2600 games? (I understand that there are some of these people out there. That generation of games I see like Johnson's famous dog walking on its hind legs, remarkable because of what it's doing at all, not necessarily because it's being done well.) A couple of solid, classic titles (see me contradict my previous statement almost immediately!) accompany the station wagon - I appreciate the tradition of treating a gifted console like a wallet, which is considered unlucky when given "empty" (without games). Always give a console with at least one game! One non-terrible game.
I didn't even know that the Wii came in black! I've only ever seen them in cute and cuddly white before, like Eve from Wall-E. Whoever owned this black unit must have been a badass. I gather that we're enough generations along now that old Wiis are becoming a dime a dozen, but I was surprised to see that the seller included the Gamecube controllers -- I figure that whatever my mother-in-law paid for the machine was probably worth it for the GC controllers alone, like they threw in the console and other parts for free.
???! What is this I don't even. In what world do I want to incorporate storage of Nintendo DS cards into my Lego constructions? Get out of my stocking and stay out. Granny, there's a good reason someone had bequeathed these to the thrift store unopened.
That's a nice array of really random Wii games! Something for everyone. Again, when I saw these, I figured that whatever "Granny" paid for all of them was probably worth it for the relatively hip games in the middle row (Smash Bros, Kart, DK) alone, with the rest thrown in with a kind of "promise not to bring them back" caveat. Underwhelming as many of these discs are, I can report that my 5 and 2 year old daughters were OVER THE MOON about the Dora the Explorer game. Look at that cover. Look at it!
At my twice-annual vintage gaming party, bryface wanted to play a modern Russian Roulette NES cart which required an NES zapper. I was sure I had one, but couldn't find it. Then I got one for Christmas. Now, I have found the other one. But I do not have the cart! Well, I suppose that next time we do the party we can host two rounds of Russian Roulette simultaneously. There's a dystopian situation if taken out of context!
I don't know if I've ever before seen socks with a copyright message. Do they have the Nintendo Seal of Quality?
More of the same -- not just Mario socks, but Luigi and Boo ones also. PS, these are for my kids' feet, sadly I doubt they make Nintendo socks in a men's size 15. I had a pair of Mario boxer shorts but they disintegrated in the wash. Where can you get quality video game underwear for larger men?
Pardon the blurry photo, but here my eldest is wearing a shirt emblazoned with the alphabet, spelled out in tiles from Super Mario Bros. It's awesome. I received a couple of good shirts also...
Spot the plumber! This design is actually a bit of a headache to piece apart, so busy with uncoloured pixelated outlines of Super Mario sprites, but nearly everything important is crammed in there somewhere. The flash of spot colour isn't just ink, it's embroidered on!
Different T-shirt, same license, different gimmick. The pipe is the breast pocket on the T-shirt; flat against your chest just the two heads peep out, but if you open the pocket you see their little bodies within.
A comic book history of video games? I gave comics myself to my wife last Christmas -- as the parents of small children, we need literature that is good for short bouts of reading, because those are often all we get. (Hers were more on the Kate Beaton side of things, but this proves to be a compelling read in an accessible medium!)
And there you have it -- the most penetrating insights about the specific items populating this pile of gifts I was able to come up with in the final sliver of my next-month window to report back on it. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! See you all in February, hopefully with some more posts on textmode art. Cheers!
I forget precisely where I picked up this habit, but ever couple of years I like to stump my fellow video game scholars over at Mobygames in a curious but creative way, collaging up a logo using letters sourced, ransom-note-style, from the distinctive box art of celebrated video and computer games. Eventually I began CCing these challenges to the old blog, and even to this new blog. But the fact remains I haven't done one for quite a while. Well, I guess I've got momentum; I put one together... and went on to scrape together another one! The first took the experts about a week to solve: you can warm up on it before we switch to "expert mode" and I defy you to fill in the blanks yourself:
Now are you ready to have revealed the sources of these letters? Spoiler warning: here they come! The leading M comes from none other than MegaMan 4. (Where possible, I like to source a letter from the beginning of a word. Sometimes that's not always the interesting letter in that word, but it's a bone I toss to the puzzle-solvers: looking for an M, what's an M-game? A game starting with an M (especially alliteratively, as here) will naturally be where their mind wanders first.)
As just mentioned above, here's an exception to prove the rule: "No More Heroes" contains three "O"s, all more interesting than the other letters in the words. I guess it's more like a guideline.
This "B" caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. I didn't think of Marble Madness as a forgotten game, and I figured that the NES version would be one of the most-seen... but its logo was burdened by being part of a wave of logos that reeeeally wanted to remind people of Indiana Jones for some reason (think that's bad, A Boy And His Blob does it with the logo AND the theme song!) and folks were just finding every game using this font except for the one I actually used.
So down the line I actually updated the collaged logo with this more distinctive B sourced from a different platform's release of the same game. Early EA game boxes: so classy!
Not every letter needs to be a mystery to unravel; sometimes I toss people a bone and just give them an easy win. Hence this "Y", from Destiny 2:
New line! This G served to be quite a bit trickier than I'd anticipated -- I gather that SSI may have figured more prominently in my particular circles than in the wider world. But it's nonetheless quite distinctive, from "Dark Legions":
Electronic cover art doesn't give you as much to work with, but (as with Destiny above) I like to work with modern classics as well as the genuinely vintage ones, so the "A" came from "Don't Starve":
The second "M" was a bit of a postmodern mis-en-abyme self-indulence: for my ransom-note-style collage I have sampled game box art with a ransom-note typographical conceit, for a game with "ransom" in its name. River City Ransom of course:
I thought that this one would be easier, but its American marketing and packaging always was quite at odds from the game content, so there may remain some lingering cognitive dissonance. The messy "E" originates from "Zombie Nation":
And to help keep things interesting, I flipped this letter so as to better fit -- a second SSI game quoted, this "S" comes from A Line In The Sand:
(and I like to include tastes of extraordinary video game experiences in the background: in this case, it's the boss screen from F.Godmom, shareware puzzle game famously beloved of Tom "Ion Storm" Hall!)
OK, now "MobyGames" is easy, it only contains nine letters. You can try your hand at "Pixel Pompeii", with 25% further challenge!
OK, first things first: let's queue up the tunes. Here's a .SID arrangement of the song "A Kind Of Magic", made in 2 days by Martin Galway for the Ocean Software Commodore 64 video game adaptation of the 1986 movie Highlander (and by all reports, the best part of it.)
Got the song rolling? Good. Here we go: there's no good explanation for it. My specific demographic cohort got involved with the artscene roughly contemporary to the culmination of the enterprise that was the band Queen. There it was, we were in early high school, 1992, Wayne's World was in the theatres (making Bohemian Rhapsody the only song to ever be the UK Christmas #1 song in two different years, '75 and '91), and everyone who was anyone performed at the '92 Freddie Mercury memorial concert at Wembley Stadium (did you see the look on Axl Rose's face after Elton John hugged him?)
It was all a bit of a curiosity to me, but to my classmate and colleague Nitnatsnoc (nickname sourced from an Immersion Francais Sciences Humaines unscramble-the-word exercise about the late Roman Empire) the Queen seed that the context planted took root and grew like a flourishing weed. He had caught the bug, and between dreams and schemes to set up our own BBS, he kept trying to share what he felt were the most fascinating nuggets of dank Queen lore. "Did you know that after Freddie Mercury died, he was castrated?" "... ?!" "Sorry, did I say castrated? I meant cremated!" Even once we got our BBS together, the first Mistigris WHQ (world headquarters) The Screaming Tomato, he would hold forth on all matters Queen (such as they were -- as he noted many a time, there are only so many breaking developments in your favorite band once their lead singer dies) in the message bases and at meets and even allude to it in the headers of his ANSI art illustrations (here's an example from MIST1094, where he mentions Queen in all his scrollers save one. The following month, he reports: "Remember? I was that guy who never stopped talking about Queen in his ANSI headers." You might think he'd have gotten over it by 0195, but think again. March? Nope! He doesn't mention them in the Mistigris April 1995 collection, an artpack which he was in charge of assembling, but look a little closer: the "file separators" are all Queen song lyrics!)
So even though the band formed in 1970 and made its most audacious leaps forward before we were ever born, due to my close association with this freshly minted Queen mega-fan, memories of the early '90s still resonate in a very Queen-ly way. Turns out, some other computer artists and textmode specialists feel the same way! Here's as complete a gallery as I've been able to lazily come up with. I'll try to go in a meandering chronological-by-subject sequence.
For a bonus, some 20 years closer to the source, the same image appeared in a still from the 1987 C64 demo "Queen Alive" by the Norfolk Cracking Service (and, who knows, there might be further such goodies to be found within should anyone care to actually run the demo in question):
Here we have a contest-winning Fat Bottomed Girls / Bicycle Race (1978) piece by teletext genius Horsenburger from the early 2017 Block Party convention:
This is a monochrome piece by Russian ANSI artist dman_pcb depicting Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in his "yellow leather jacket" period circa 1986-89. No colours, but it still gets the idea across:
That yellow leather jacket is alluded to here again, followed by a distinctly Nitnatsnoc-ian (it was inevitable, really) toony ANSI art interpretation of the Queen crest:
CCCfire of Mistigris also drew the crest in ANSI art, beneath Mick Rock's distinctive group shot used in the album cover of Queen II (1974) as well as closing (and opening, Nitty points out!) the Bohemian Rhapsody music video:
Horsenburger took a crack at reproducing that group shot in teletext also:
The artist is sadly unknown, alas (MZ-700 is the machine), but the same scene again was attempted (quite successfully, in my estimation, given the limits of the format) in the SHARPSCII character art medium:
and, OK, this is no textmode art at all -- pixelart but still very a propos, one final no-one-can-get-more-minimalist-than-this take on the same scene:
While we're on the Bohemian Rhapsody wavelength, we interrupt this gallery of visual art for some further (non-underground) chipmusic adaptations of Queen songs. Here they are, the notorious abysmal fragmentary arrangements of "Bohemian Rhapsody" from the SNES and Sega Genesis versions of the 1993 Wayne's World movie video game tie-in -- fanboys claim that the Genesis version is worse, but it's an academic distinction. (The Genesis version, conversely, implements the headbanging quite a bit better!) The separate Game Boy WW version somehow manages to have a superior arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody, picking up where the others leave off. (Ironically, a member of my band once contacted me late at night, letting me know that she was stuck at a party sitting next to a man whose chiefest claim to fame was apparently having composed the music for the Game Boy version of Wayne's World, and did I have any questions for him? It was put together by local developers, so the claim checks out -- she must have been seated next to one Paul Wilkinson. Little did I realise I'd someday be dedicating a paragraph in a blog post to that very subject or I might have passed along some follow-up questions. Alas!)
(Of course, even the least of these is still realms beyond the execrable recording of Bohemian Rhapsody made an a basement TABmeet and later released in an April Fool's artpack.)
Settled your stomach yet? This striking teletext screen depicts the album art to 1989's The Miracle, originally computer art itself -- composited using Quantel Paintbox -- as drawn by Horsenburger:
And closing down our hit parade chronologically, teletext organizer Illarterate drew this screen in honour of what would have been Freddie Mercury's 70th birthday in September of 2017:
And that's it for the visual art, but here's one more tune, an uncredited arrangement of 1980's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love, from the opening and closing (credits) to the 1983 Commodore 64 game "Frantic Freddie" (no relation):
BUT WAIT! The Queenmeister himself, Nitnatsnoc, has emerged from retirement to make a couple of further notes:
Speaking of music videos, not sure if you know, but the video for The Invisible Man (by Queen) has a video game theme [ed. looks a lot like Activision's 1985 Little Computer People], and starts with a shot of a shelf full of real C64 titles. Also, there was a Queen video game in the 90s called The eYe which had several instrumental and remixed versions of Queen songs, although by then you couldn't call it "computer game music."
(Jan, 2018: "Mister Girls", trying somehow to poke fun at my computer art collective, release a very strange artpack including the following piece, an ANSI art adaptation of Queen's 1982 album Hot Space:)
Supplemental: oh wait, that must have been in response to Uglifruit's teletext screen on the same subject from the MIST0917 artpack:
And while I'm in here making an update, here's one final specimen, a PETSCII rendition of Freddie Mercury drawn by Jate of HiRMU:
#/media/File:Queen_News_Of_The_World.png){kind=link}
#/media/File:Queen_The_Miracle.png){kind=link}