From the team at BOL in Barcelona: “Retrogame Issues takes us back to a decade of big hair, saturated colors, 8-bits, local arcades, and when setting up a new video game required MacGyver-like skills.

“The entire premise of the film is based on the very game-like nature of these limitations – often enough, actually managing to play the game would become a game in itself. This, in turn, would lead to some out-of-the-box thinking, providing home-made solutions for technical problems and proving, once again, that limitations often foster creativity.

“Our creative approach was based on the same principle: we used limitations as a means to increase creativity and designed the whole film in PETSCII art, with nothing else but 8-Bit character sets used as graphic elements to illustrate and animate the story.
 

“We created geometric shapes out of built-in symbols and letters available in the PETSCII character set and added colors and 8-bit mapping techniques to create depth and texture.”

 
“Originally a type of character encoding used on Commodore’s 8-bit computers, PETSCII contains a rather extensive set of graphic symbols and allows the use of colors (unlike the more popular ASCII), but it’s at the same time a lot more limiting than using pixels.

“We created geometric shapes out of built-in symbols and letters available in the PETSCII character set and added colors and 8-bit mapping techniques to create depth and texture.

“Character dialogues were included visually in the compositions in order to add more expression and we used frame-by-frame animation in PETSCII with the help of the LVLLVL software to bring everything to life.

“The narrative structure resembles a video game with story chapters instead of levels to enhance the whole experience: we see every issue and its solution building up in a retro tutorial within the main story, as our character manages to solve each problem to get to the next one.”
 

 
Production: BOL
Director/animator: All In Pixel

Audio: All In Pixel

Toolkit: PETSCII