asciiQuake: Quake in Characters, Drawn with CSS

A project called asciiQuake has surfaced online — an attempt to present the cult shooter as a moving picture made of typographic characters. By all appearances, instead of the usual three-dimensional graphics, the image here is assembled from letters, digits and signs familiar to everyone from the era of ASCII art.

The technical side is handled by a solution with the telling name GlyphCSS. If the caption “Powered by GlyphCSS” is to be believed, it is precisely this that takes on the rendering of the character picture — meaning the expressiveness is achieved by means that usually handle the styling of web pages rather than game graphics.

There is little more to say about the project based on the available information: the page presents the work itself and its technological foundation without going into detail. Even so, the idea itself looks characteristic of the genre of technical curiosities, where what matters is not practical purpose but the elegance of the trick: taking a game everyone knows and reassembling it from makeshift elements never intended for anything of the sort.

Experiments like these rarely aspire to replace the original. Their value lies elsewhere — they remind us that even familiar tools can be turned in an unexpected direction and made to draw something they were seemingly never created for.

Source: Lobsters