This Month in Pixels: September ’08

Here’s a better-late-than-never roundup of all the worthwhile pixel art I found throughout September. Next month I’m going to expand this feature to include every kind of interesting piece of video-game art (mostly 8-bit of course) I come across, since that’s sorta what I do anyway. For example, the above image really has nothing to do with pixels and everything to do with the NES. It comes from supermandolini. Without any more delay:

ffffound points us to this fun, misleading Atari Game Box. Speaking of Atari, check out these Atari Modern Classics, which re-create today’s games as classic old game boxes. You remember, when everything was a “Video Computer System Game Program” because those words, strung together like that, just sounded great?

Yeah, you gotta plug it in and the scale sorta ruins the whole point of it, but this “high definition” Lite-Brite from Bandai lets you use 1600 LEDs to make the design of your childhood dreams, plus it comes with software to let you plan out and preview things first. You know, because this is such a serious undertaking and all.

Here’s a beautiful video, called “Dot Matrix Revolution”, which chronicles (well, sort of) a history of the computer using pixel art. It’s by a Canadian group known as SuperBrothers. Better quality here.

Last month’s feature had a bathroom re-done entirely in 1×1 tiles along these lines, and now we’ve got it taken to the next, commercial step: get your finest-Italian-ceramic Tetris Tiles today.

Those two guys behind MythBusters rigged up 1100 paintballs to some kind of gigantic, insane gun and fired them simultaneously. It made a kind of painting in about a tenth of a second and is, if nothing else, funny.

Here’s an art installation by Antoinette J. Citizen in which an entire room is made into a Mario Brothers level, complete with sound effects coming out of the interactive boxes. I’ll take it for some obscure basement room in the gigantic suburban house I’ll probably never have.

Finally, NerdyShirts gives us this Nintendo Family Tree on a shirt, and we’re done for now. More next month!