I’m speechless with awe. Some intrepid hobbyist has created note-perfect renditions of classic 80s video games using needlepoint stitching patterns.

As astute readers may recall, I once posted about the way modern game-graphic techniques have borrowed from some of the tricks that ancient tapestry-designers used to employ. Specifically:

Early computer pioneers actually borrowed directly from the techniques of ancient artists. Consider “anti-aliasing”. Back when medieval tapestry weavers and Islamic tile-mosaic artists were doing their work in the 11th to 14th centuries, they innovated a neat technique for making edges appear more curved. If the artists were using black tiles to make a rounded corner, they’d insert a few grey ones in the crevices of right-angled parts — creating the illustion that the corner was smoother than it really was. That technique, anti-aliasing, was later used by Apple fontographers in the early 1980s, when they were trying to create smoother-looking edges on their fonts for the first WYSIWYG Macintosh computers.

But it never occurred to me to reverse the influence — and use the chunky pixellation of stitching to emulate video-game design. What a brave new world, that has such people in it!

(A tip of the hat to Memepool for finding this one!)