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Looking through ASCII and ANSI art brought me back to STAR WARS ASCIIMATION. I’d seen it before, but revisiting it reminded me just how cool it is.

Star Wars scenes. Animated. With text characters.

Go take a look. I’ll wait.

I like projects that make me think about how much can be expressed with very little. A fixed grid of characters sounds restrictive, but then someone uses it to give you recognizable shapes, movement, and a scene you can follow.

You can see the constraint and the ingenuity at the same time. That is a large part of the appeal for me.

Simon Jansen’s FAQ explains how he builds the animation: frames of text displayed in sequence, with timing information controlling how long they remain on screen. He started the project in July 1997.

The underlying idea is easy to describe. Actually drawing and arranging those frames is where the patience and craft show up.

There is even a ComputerCraft adaptation called alongtimeago, which lets the animation play on monitors inside Minecraft. The ComputerCraft wiki credits dan200 for that version, and the player is in the ComputerCraft source repository. Simon Jansen’s original animation gets another place to be enjoyed.

A movie made of text, playing on a computer monitor inside a game. That is a particularly good way to get my attention.

I spend enough time thinking about what software is supposed to accomplish for a customer or a business. It’s refreshing to find a project whose appeal needs so little justification. Someone wanted to make this, worked out how, and made something fun to watch.

That is plenty of reason for it to exist.

I’m linking to the project itself so you can see the animation and read the creator’s explanation. A paragraph about text animation is a poor substitute for watching it happen.

Fair warning: this may lead to a much longer detour through ASCII art than you originally intended.