ANSI Art

Okay, so back in the early 90s, I was involved in the ANSI art scene. It started because I was into BBSs first, as it was a great way to get free games. My friend Chris ran a local board, and I became co-sysop there, and along with that got the job of making the site look pretty. Chris is a fantastic programmer, but he'll be the first to tell you he has no sense when it comes to design. I'd seen some of the stuff that early ANSI artists were doing, and decided I could do better.

Somehow, I attracted the attention of a local (that is, East Coast) ANSI group called [GRiM], and I joined up. I was something of a novelty, as it wasn't until after I joined the group that I happened upon TheDraw. Up until then, I'd been coding ANSIs by hand.

Yes, by hand. I entered each escape code manually in EDIT, doing a couple lines at a time, saving the file, and letting it run, to see how it came out. Tedious, but at the time I didn't know any other way. The advantage I had was that I was forced to learn how exactly how the codes all worked. I had a couple of cheat sheets printed out that lived near the monitor: one listed each character in the ASCII character set as well as the corresponding Alt codes, the other had all the ANSI escape codes for changing the foreground and background colors, as well as moving the cursor around.

I'd been with [GRiM] for a few months when talk came down the pipe of merging with [iCE], and before I knew it, I was in the big time. For a while, I had a nice deal going. I'd do a login or status screen for some sysop, they'd give me leech access on their board. And I leeched games like crazy. I even had an account on the infamous PITS BBS (only 20 minutes a day, but you could get a lot of stuff in 20 minutes if you knew what you were doing).

By 1994, I was going to college, and had was working at McDs (it was better than nothing at the time), so I suddenly had a lot less time to draw. I dropped out of the scene, and never really had a chance to get back to it, even after dropping out of college.

In 1997 or so, one of the [iCE] guys called me up out of the blue and invited me to come back. I gave it a world-class try, but the magic just wasn't there anymore. This is a recurring theme in my life: I'm a sucker for nostalgia, but more often than not, trying to recapture the wonders of times long past ends up unsatisfying and frustrating. Oh well.

Ahem. Now that I'm done clearing my throat...

I was watching BBS: The Documentary the other night, and I got to Episode 5: Artscene. Now, I was expecting that there would be some interviews with people I knew (at least by handle, if not by name or face), and there were. But what I wasn't expecting was one of my own pieces to come sliding across the screen halfway through the episode. My roommates could hear the squeal of delight on the other side of the house.

It was just a really great feeling to be able to point to the screen and say "That was me. I did that." It made my day.

So today I downloaded all the iCEpacks I was involved with, and found a viewer capable of converting them to actual image files, and uploaded them all here. They're part of my artistic career, and deserve a place with all my other artwork. Now if I could only find all the stuff I drew on paper before 1996...

-- Ben