Before the tyranny of SEO pushed us all to do it professionally, the best video game guides They were not on your news reference website or in your favorite gaming magazine, they were written by amateur players to post them in any forum and, for months -or even years-, they were updating it little by little with whatever details they found.
Preserved like a mosquito in amber on pages like GameFAQs, the guides of that time were characterized by two things, their humble origin and the spectacular editing work behind a simple text without artifice that, in the absence of images or videos, had to enter through the eyes based on characters ASCII and an exquisite format.
The origin of ASCII art
As digital heirs to Belle Époque pointillism, the ASCII artists they use simple characters to shape a drawing or generate a visually richer text. What Luce and Van Gogh created based on tiny dots that gave their paintings a unique style, they did based on letters, dashes and asterisks.
– Wait, are you comparing this with this one?
Not only that, I am saying that there is a direct relationship between the two. In fact, you don’t have to jump too far to come across the first ASCII art in history. As stated in the book Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology we owe it to the butterfly created by Flora FF Stacey on a typewriter back in 1898. Yes, in the middle of the Belle Époque and at the gates of the Universal Exhibition in Paris.
In those first drawings the technique consisted of turning the paper over to shape more elaborate drawings, but the origin of the idea was exactly the same, placing different elements on the paper that, once gained a certain distance and perspective, transformed simple letters in a meaningful representation.
The Bauhaus school did not take long to embrace the technique and, by the 1920s, there was already a large collection of images and texts that sought to cross borders from a typewriter. 40 years before the American Standards Committee gave it meaning, rules and a name, the ASCII characters they had already approached the art world.
Games, guides and the democratization of ASCII art
With the arrival of the original video game, the lack of graphic resources forced the creators to represent maps and art using those same characters and, for those who grew up seeing that style of drawings on their mammoth monitors, the leap to recreate them as a way of expression was obvious.
The forums arrived, their characteristics signatures in ASCII format and emoticons using the same characters, and by the mid-90s when the internet began to flood our homes, those creations became part of our daily lives. So much so that they also became part of that world of amateur guides.
Maps designed to guide you through a level to find a secret, numerous tables of status and statistics on characters, graphic representations of how to tackle a challenge and, of course, also the logos and the art with which those guides were opened.
Over time solutions began to emerge to transform simple images into ASCII art hardly effortless, but the work of those early titans who transformed the Doom logo into a collection of dots and letters will always be remembered as something worthy of any digital museum. I leave you with a collection of some of the best images I have found.
Best ASCII Art Images from Video Game Guides
Images | GameFAQs ASCII Art