What would happen if you took old school 80's video games and showed people what really happened? Pac-man doesn't just eat the ghosts, he actually tears right through him. Mario? He pops off mushroom's eyeballs with his angry stomp! Steven Lefcourt is a designer who likes to push boundaries. His work brings back some old memories but reimagines them with a dark twist. Here, in his words, is his story: “Welcome to my new project: 8-Bit Fatalities. The idea behind the project stems from growing up at an arcade, and my eventual love affair with Mortal Kombat. Before Mortal Kombat, violence in video games was largely unheard of or ignored because of its extreme pixelized simplicity. But when Liu Kang and Sub Zero came along to finish off arcade goers the world changed and parents were in an uproar (not mine though). I couldn't understand what the big deal was though, because as a videogame player all my life I had already considered my actions life and death. Just because you didn't see pac-man violently tearing into the ghosts with his jaws, or mario smashing in the brains of a goomba, thats what I knew was happening. I knew my goal was to kill these enemies, so Mortal Kombat wasn't a big change for me. To me, it was still just a game, where fake deaths happened as part of game progression. To uninformed adults, however, Mortal Kombat was a photo realistic depiction of kids becoming complicit in virtual murders. And so, I decided to show everyone just what I imagined was happening when these little blocky, pixelized abstractions did when they came into contact with eachother, but in a much more visceral, and gory way than could ever be shown with limited graphical systems. Today, we get to see what happens when an over zealous blue ghost tries to bite off more than he can chew. A powered up pac-man was not staying inside his ectoplasmic stomach for long.”
Pac-man
Final Fantasy 1
Kirby
Snake Pit
Galaga
Super Mario Bros. TastyPaints.com Flickr
