He made a game without textures and graphics. A surprising remake of a cult hit

Gradius, because this is the game we are talking about, is one of the most classic games of this type SHMUP (short for shoot ’em up), i.e. shooting games in which we have to fight off hordes of enemies by shooting tons of bullets at them in a vertical plane. It was one of the most famous games of this type in Europe Space Invadersbut Gradius also has its niche.

A developer anyway Jon Cortazar turned Gradius into a game using… pure text/ASCII characters instead of graphics. And no, this is not a graphic stylized as text – only real textrendered character by character. A bit like some primitive Commodore 64 games from the 1980s, but the effect is there fully animated. What is most admirable is this approach it did not reduce fluidity or playability — a hail of bullets flies like in a typical retro-game in 8- or 16-bit style. By the way, fans of nostalgic productions can use it various CRT filterssimulating old monitors with phosphor dots (green, amber, white, etc.) or interlace lines. The funniest thing is that you can take screenshots and they are saved as… text files!