Stranger Things 8-bit Cinema

October 1, 2016 11:02 AM

Stranger Things 8-bit cinema, which is nostalgia².
posted by SpacemanStix (19 comments total)

/nerd snob voice: that's distinctly 16 bit! Late 80s/early 90s!

(I doubt it would be as much fun in period perfect Atari ET cartridge level graphics)
posted by Artw at 11:17 AM on October 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

"You find dead Barbara."

This is really good.

This related video of the cast having fun is also just adorable.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 11:47 AM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I was just about to work on this, there's a whole series of these! I always say that my best FPP's are the ones someone else made. :)
posted by Room 641-A at 12:29 PM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Very impressive! The wait for season 2 will be interminable.
posted by gwint at 12:48 PM on October 1, 2016

Matthew Modine's hair needs to be one pixel higher.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:49 PM on October 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure what's worse:

1) When most artists make "8-bit" art they never bother following the actual rules of NES-era graphics.
2) I'm annoyed when they don't.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:21 PM on October 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

If we didn't have emulators and could leave old things the hell alone like you're supposed to, our memories of what NES graphics were like would probably be a lot closer to this.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:29 PM on October 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

If we didn't have emulators and could leave old things the hell alone like you're supposed to


Hey you kids, get off my ROM.
posted by CynicalKnight at 6:57 PM on October 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I found that the stranger things adventure game tribute does good justice to the genre it purports to tribute.
posted by Karaage at 7:29 PM on October 1, 2016

grump grump automatically calling all pixel art "8-bit" is like automatically calling all instrumental music "classical"
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:24 AM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

(I doubt it would be as much fun in period perfect Atari ET cartridge level graphics)

Well, Adventure is Stranger Things: the Game. Heck, it can be the official game for anything if you believe hard enough!
posted by lmfsilva at 4:30 AM on October 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

grump grump automatically calling all pixel art "8-bit" is like automatically calling all instrumental music "classical"

'8-bit'=actually 8-bit graphics:'Classical'=Haydn-to-early-Beethoven::'8-bit'=retro pixel graphics:'Classical'=western orchestral art music

Ta Da! How language works, ladies and gents!
posted by straight at 1:40 PM on October 2, 2016

Yeah, but 90s pixel graphics for a show that tries so hard to be 1983 is a tiny bit off.
posted by Artw at 2:35 PM on October 2, 2016

This goes off the rails at the very beginning by combining enormous pixels for the badly auto-resampled letters with medium-sized pixels for "PRESS START" with tiny HD-sized pixels for completely smooth scaling & movement. It doesn't get better.
posted by designbot at 7:08 AM on October 3, 2016

See, I'd want to start our with figuring out how you'd do the letters in, say, double sized Commodore 64 sprites, and that's why my version of this probably wouldn't be as fun to most people...
posted by Artw at 7:37 AM on October 3, 2016

by combining enormous pixels for the badly auto-resampled letters with medium-sized pixels for "PRESS START" with tiny HD-sized pixels for completely smooth scaling & movement

Or as I usually say, a pixel is a unit of measure, and it needs to be consistent on the same scene.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:51 AM on October 3, 2016

Well, except in mobile web dev now, and god help you if you go down that rabbit hole...
posted by Artw at 9:49 AM on October 3, 2016

I went. And desperately dug back outside just a few minutes in.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:31 AM on October 3, 2016

So Earthbound/Mother? I thought the sign in the evil facility in Stranger Things said 'HAL Labs' at first.

Also Stranger Things is a nice nostalgia bath, and a fun show to watch in a weekend, but I can't believe people are still obsessed with what is essentially a bunch of movie references in a stew with Beyond the Black Rainbow.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 7:13 PM on October 3, 2016 [2 favorites]