Pixel Art - Wherein we curate and sperg over our favorite 2D game assets

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There's four games I'd love to mine for backgrounds in their entirety; Manhunter: New York, King's Quest 4, Space Quest 3, and Monkey Island.

Loom, too. Definitely

On further recollection, The Black Cauldron had some good stuff. And the original Leisure Suit Larry was like the Big Lebowski of DOS/Sierra games, imho.
 
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There's four games I'd love to mine for backgrounds in their entirety; Manhunter: New York, King's Quest 4, Space Quest 3, and Monkey Island.

Loom, too. Definitely

You can play the whole thing online these days, and the BGs are out there, just gotta be mined.
Shit's beautiful, I don't know why people don't revive it.

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Not classic, but I've always thought the ghostly Joey and Jaime dance was strangely compelling.

EDIT: I've posted this in the retro gaming thread, but one of my most favourite pixel art era graphics is that of Deuteros: The Next Millennium on Atari ST and Amiga. It's so delightfully twisted and tortured. The Blaser (which is no shit a cluster of gamma-ray lasers powered by a nuclear bomb which can clean out a whole Methanoid drone swarm in one shot) is a perfect example of this.

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This first image is super high res & can be zoomed in on.

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These are logos from the DemoScene. They're hand made works of pixel art.
The demo scene began with software piracy. People would crack a game's copy protection and release it [cracked] on BBS dial ups. To gain clout, the hackers would attach their nickname to the program that showed as it ran. This was like a graf artist catching a tag, in a sense - there's a notion of "I did this" behind all these works and that's why there's so much importance placed on logo design in this scene (IMO, anyway). Additionally, because there was so little free memory on disks at that time? Making a beautiful logo took programming skills as well as artistry. It's like a graffiti artist making a beautiful piece in a seemingly inaccessible spot, you dig?

Over time, those names evolved into logos, then animated logos, then graphical displays, and then someone said "Why don't we forget piracy and just make video art?"

The demo scene was born. The demoscene shows off programming and design prowess. The Demo Scene is to video games what poetry is to prose.

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These two use only 4 colors:
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I believe this next one is a 16 color image:

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I recently found large scale maps of entire arcade levels - but they need to be trimmed down.

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I have a LOT more where these came from.
 
Not classic, but I've always thought the ghostly Joey and Jaime dance was strangely compelling.

EDIT: I've posted this in the retro gaming thread, but one of my most favourite pixel art era graphics is that of Deuteros: The Next Millennium on Atari ST and Amiga. It's so delightfully twisted and tortured. The Blaser (which is no shit a cluster of gamma-ray lasers powered by a nuclear bomb which can clean out a whole Methanoid drone swarm in one shot) is a perfect example of this.
We seem to have exactly the same taste in games.

You might have liked Gilbert's earlier work as well, the Shivah.

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We seem to have exactly the same taste in games.

You might have liked Gilbert's earlier work as well, the Shivah.

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Not played that yet but I might give it a go.

There's also Unavowed, which is set in the Blackwell universe (KayKay, Officer Durkin, and Robbie Siegel all put in an appearance). In it, you are drafted into a secret society of supernatural troubleshooters after a brush with a demon and it goes from there as you deal with a New York in which the monsters are real, so for instance there's a dryad imprisoned in Central Park, a Wall Street banker made a deal with a faerie to avoid bankruptcy, and a tramp who looks strangely like Jesse Pinkman accidentally becomes a fire elemental because he just wanted to be warm. One reviewer described it as "the Curse of Staten Island."

Anyhow, have some artwork:

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Yeah, you thought Shardlight had tasty pixels, you ain't seen nothing yet!
 
Not played that yet but I might give it a go.

There's also Unavowed, which is set in the Blackwell universe (KayKay, Officer Durkin, and Robbie Siegel all put in an appearance). In it, you are drafted into a secret society of supernatural troubleshooters after a brush with a demon and it goes from there as you deal with a New York in which the monsters are real, so for instance there's a dryad imprisoned in Central Park, a Wall Street banker made a deal with a faerie to avoid bankruptcy, and a tramp who looks strangely like Jesse Pinkman accidentally becomes a fire elemental because he just wanted to be warm. One reviewer described it as "the Curse of Staten Island."

Anyhow, have some artwork:

ss_9bda586aeeafbcbbdaeea824d35221a0e5df41e2.1920x1080.jpg


Yeah, you thought Shardlight had tasty pixels, you ain't seen nothing yet!

I thought unavowed was kinda bad, but I've played each of the wadjey eye games.

I just didn't think the characters were very interesting. But I tend to enjoy Gilbert's bohemian outlook and romanticization of old new york.
 
If you look in some of the corners of various demoscene pics, you'll see the words "No Copy".

This, in my best estimation, is the primordial OC Donut Steel. Difference is, these guys were for real. Shit was OC & they were warning other scene types not to copy their pixel art.

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Have you ever had a game that just activated your almonds? Inspired your autism? For me, that game was Xenophobe, which I first discovered in arcade cabinet form while skiing near the Canadian border. I was soaked, cold, young, nerdy & holding a cup of hot cocoa after surviving a black diamond for the first time. Beyond the cafeteria there was a Xenophobe machine. It hypnotized me. There was something about it, it was anachronistic, it had an air of wood paneled electronics lost in a more modern age by way of negligence.

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(it was a stand out cabinet)
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Not being able to play it on the arcade once I got home, I pursued it on the Atari Lynx, NES and ANYWHERE else I could find it. It's not even a good game, I just... I love it.

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These are some sprites from it. I think my love of the aesthetic is a love of a certain very transitory and experimental time in game design and graphics.
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Final note - Check out this site, it has sprites and goodies from LOADS of games. Post any good finds here!

 
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