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Remember how great ASCII art used to be in game guides?90s kids, memories
90s kids, memories
I used to sit up reading these in the 90s and 00s, a little goblin who wasn’t yet good enough to complete these games without help. You reached out to me, guides writers, and you never even knew it. And the true marker of the dedication of these artisans can be seen in one thing: the ASCII art of game titles they put in at the top of their work. A true craft that has died out but deserves to be seen and celebrated.
ASCII basically just means ‘the standard way of displaying text on your computer screen’, but since humans are an enterprising lot, we have long used it to represent more than just display text. Example: I can make an ASCII smiley face. :D
Back in the before times, before you could easily splash actual images onto the internet, ASCII art was a way to make your guides purdy to look at, and many guides writers really rose to this challenge. I do recommend you actually click through to look at the guides in their original format, not only because image compression mangles the crisp edges of the ASCII art a bit, but also because the guides themselves are often a joy.
It even represents the colour change on the letters! (As a side note, you can learn a lot about Doom from reading this FAQ. The whole first section, before you get to any guide stuff, has info about the different versions of Doom and recent patches, the staff at iD, and what makes Doom different from Wolfenstein 3D.)
I’m a big fan of the use of upper and lower case for this Half Life 2 logo fromGreg Slomin’s walkthrough. The use of negative space to form the ‘2’ is a genius touch.
This, fromChandooG’s Metal Gear Solid guide, is simple and classic, but I especially enjoy the inclusion of ‘A Hideo Kojima masterpiece…’. Alice0 also liked the use of ASCII art to make a cursive handwriting style title for the table of contents.
In a similar vein, well done to Jeremy Martin, who gave hisDay Of The Tentacle walkthrougha header with a tentacle in it.
But a special shout out toAdnan Javed’s Resi 4 guide from 2005, GhostOfLegault’s artfrom J Southgate’s Resi 4 guide, andHeath Lynch’s Guide and Walkthrough, also from ‘05. The latter uses the time honoured technique of forming the letters out of smaller versions of the same letter, like a lovely matryoshka doll, so the big spooky 4 is made of 4s.
RainingMetal, a frequent Guide Of The Month winner, regularly starts their guides with a large scale ASCII portrait. I’ve used one from aLeft 4 Dead 2guide at the top, but also please enjoy this one from theirCommand & Conquer 3: Red Alert guide.
Guides like these started to fall out of use in the late 2000s and 2010s once websites got their act together with proper formatting, and ASCII art became less of a priority as a result. However, you can still find some lovely title art for more recent games. There’s a fun,massive Assassin’s Creed logo,an Arkham Asylum onein the iconic Batman bat shape, andFable 2’s title rendered entirely out of the @ symbol(that guide is also notable for having an ingenious and user friendly chapter selection system using unique letter codes and the CTRL+F find function). And, obviously, there is alwaysSkyrim:
So God bless you, the internet of 20 years ago. You weren’t better in every way, but better for having these amazing examples of creativity, love, and the indomitable spirit of man. A spirit that looked at the title of a game and whispered, “I bet you could recreate that using commas.”
