Get the Ultima Forever ASCII Banner!
Some of you may recall this tweet from Ultima franchise producer Jeff Skalski a while ago:
Stepped out of the elevator this morning and was greeted by this on the wall. It came out great! #UltimaForever twitter.com/Jeff_Skalski/s…
— Jeff Skalski (@Jeff_Skalski) January 18, 2013
Well…after a bit of an excited exchange between Jeff, Andrew Rusch, and myself, the Ultima Codex is pleased to offer the resized image from Mythic Entertainment for download here. Many thanks to Jeff and the artist(s?) at Mythic for making this available to the fan community. ASCII art is grand, isn’t it?
Wait… a JPG of ASCII art?? Wouldn’t it save a lot of room (and be infinitely scale-able) just to upload the ASCII??
But then no one would be able to display it. How many people these days even know what ASCII or ANSI means? Back when I had to walk through the snow to get to school and all that, ASCII was what let me print characters to make menu borders or text-based pixels of limited shade and epic size. ANSI was what allowed me to change one or a sequence of characters to use a foreground and background color from a 16-color palette. Higher values would result in steady blinking, which I never used because I suspected they’d cause seizures in some people.
They probably didn’t even use ASCII or ANSI standards directly, but either hacked something together or even more likely used a third-party application to convert a bitmap to the resulting image.
What’s interesting is that the creation and release of this image seems to be a nod to old-school gamers, but how many of us here know what’s up with TradeWars or ran BBS’s with custom ANSI welcome messages? I’m curious to know who experienced it in its time and who got up to speed after the fact.