Got an office morale problem? Solve it with a little team bonding exercise involving post-it notes and a dash of 8-bit inspired enthusiasm.
Staff from a Seattle Digital Solutions company called Filter put this window homage to the original Super Mario Bros together in their spare time. It’s the entirety of level 1-1.
Apparently it’s the escalation of some sort of inter-office post-it tit-for-tat.
Celebrations about Rebecca Black’s decision to remove her phenomenal smash hit from YouTube citing some sort of “copyright dispute” (we all know she just realised it was awful) will be short lived. Why? Well. Watch. The question “can this song possibly sound worse” has been answered in the affirmative.
These are pretty cool. Designing a world beating game character now seems surprisingly easy… thanks to Chris Kuma’s exploded schematics of your favourite game character from the 80s and 90s.
From two guys who call themselves Ninja Moped and do awesome stuff. They want to make a music video flinging 62 pianos over 100 metres in the air. At stuff. How awesome.
You might remember them from this 8-Bit lego stop motion.
There was a time, long ago, when computer games could be sketched on single pages. In pencil. Those were noble times. Simpler.
Here are some of Toru Iwatani’s (the game’s designer) planning drawings for Pacman. In 8-bit glory.
Here, to waste the next five minutes of your life, is the life of Jesus, from the cradle to the grave, rendered in 8 bits and 10 seconds. Your mission is to collect 12 disciples.
Some screenshots…
I’ve posted some cool wedding invitations here in my time – none cooler than this one. A couple of geeks programmed their own Marioesque invitations and sent them out on CDs. Their friends had to play through the level in order to receive the details of the nuptials. They could choose to play as either the bride or groom.
Here’s a video of the invite being played (and you can download the actual invitation (link to .exe file) if you want to invite yourself along)…
Via here.
Mmm, never eat raw toast again. Well, except for the bits you keep artistically bready in order to create this fantastically geeky breakfast art.
Instructions for building your own artistic toast makers can be found here at instructables.
This video is rightly being hailed as the best lego stop motion 8-bit tribute of all time.
It’s a pretty small pool I guess – but all the typical post fodder is included – Pacman, Mario and Tetris make an appearance…
8 Bit music takes me back to my childhood and hours of Nintendo gaming. This is a weird piece of childhood/adolecence fusion – 8 Bit Weezer.
It’s pretty cool. Not sure I’d listen to it regularly. But Island in the Sun and El Scorcho are pretty awesome. 
Video games these days are so much more fun than they were when I first picked up a console controller. I can’t remember which came first – the NES or the CD TV – it’s all a bit of a blur. Having a father with a casual gig writing games reviews had its perks. Actually, it must have been a NES. Unless the Vic-20 counts as a console…
It did, from memory, plug into your TV… in fact, as a delightful tangent – I should point out that Dad’s game reviewing gig came after he wrote and published this book – unavailable for GBP4.95 from The Book Depository – for those of you who aren’t link clickers it was called “Beyond Simple Basic – Delving deeper into your Vic-20”. Seriously, with a father like that what chance did I have of not turning out as a geek.
Anyway, that’s a significant digression from my original point – but the Vic-20 was an 8-bit machine, so it’s tangentially related. My point was – games are now better. And I’m going to suggest that graphic violence is what makes that so. So it warms me to the cockles of my heart to see this Flickr set – of 8-bit characters rendered beautifully and experiencing graphic deaths. Here’s the demise of a Goomba – cleverly titled Goombash…
There are plenty more where that came from. Including this Pac-Attack…
* the title is only vaguely clever if you know that there are 8 bits to a byte. I have actually always wondered why 8-bit machines weren’t called one byte machines. I might have to look that up…
Make your next dinner party a perfect tessellating Tetris dinner party with servings customised to fit the bill. Here’s a link to the designer. You can’t buy these yet. 
If you’re anything like me you’ve been picturing the Dark Knight – a movie that broke new ground by employing imax cameras for standard cinema shooting – in 8 bit NES style. Or maybe not. This just goes to show that you probably should have been.
It kind of makes me sad that nobody’s out there programming NES games still…
