What is now a 100 billion dollar industry started in 1958 with a single pixel bouncing across physicist William Higinbotham's computer screen. A little over a decade later we got Pong, and in 1981, Mario appears in the game Donkey Kong. Over the next two decades, franchises like Pac Man, The Legend of Zelda, Megaman, Pokémon, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Street Fighter push the boundaries of character development and world building, one blocky pixel at a time. Today, pixel artists still look to these worlds for aesthetic inspiration. Today is Video Games Day in Germany, so we've gathered some of our favorite artists from this genre, including Sasha Katz, Pug-Of-War, and Ailadi, to pay tribute to the classic arcade style.
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