In the latest installment of my impromptu City Art series, I bring you 8-Bit Cities.

8-Bit City was created by Brett Camper. Brett started the project in 2010 with 8-Bit NYC. according to Brett, the project was:

[A]n attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation.

I hope to evoke the same urge for exploration, abstract sense of scale, and perhaps most importantly unbounded excitement that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers.

Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Take some time to think about your surroundings a little differently. Set out on a quest. Be an adventurer.

To date, Brett has created 18 cities: New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Austin, Detroit, Boulder, Kyoto, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Nijmegen, Seattle, Portland and Singapore. Cities in the works include Los Angeles, Chicago, Rome, Copenhagen, Barcelona and Shanghai.

Brett uses map data from OpenStreetMap, a community-managed, wiki-like map of the world.

London

New York

Seattle

As somebody who came of age in the 1980s and remembers spending hours playing Legend of Zelda on my Nintendo, these maps resonate with me. I hope he continues the series and expands to Canadian cities.

I noticed that he crowd-sourced some of the funding through Kickstarter for the existing maps.  Perhaps we can make an offer to add Vancouver to the list!