Anxiety is an interactive exploration of early 1990s artwork by Suzanne Treister, who imagined games that didn't exist, first as paintings and then digitally, with a Commodore Amiga. Their appeal is, naturally, in their deeply evocative peculiarity. "Honestly, they're a mood," writes rumpel, the Argentine developer whose 8-bit "glitchy homage" implements it in Bitsy.
Treister: "From the mid to late 1980s I spent a lot of time hanging around videogame arcades in London. I started to think about the games, their structures, their objectives, their themes, their addictiveness. I started to consider their cultural subtexts, antecedents, the effect they may have on society and how they might develop and connect to other mechanisms, developments and fantasies or projections of the future. From 1989 I started making paintings about them and in January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots."
Recreating the originals pixel by pixel seems like it would be straightforward (to the coordinates, if not colors) but a lot of work.
