The walk-through city made of ASCII symbols doesn’t require any 3D models at all.
Since 1963, ASCII has been a character encoding standard that makes it possible for our computers to store and process information in the first place. But you can also turn the 128 characters into real art. They’re mostly used to create still images that can achieve a remarkable level of detail when viewed from a distance.
Now, however, a solo developer has tried a completely different approach. The British developer has crafted afully explorable cyberpunk city using nothing but ASCII characters.
“Cyberpunk 1977”
On his YouTube channel calledGrow Now! Games, Rhys usually posts trailers for his indie game projects, such as the recent Forager’s Finds (View the game on Steam). A few days ago, however, he uploaded a completely different video that has already been viewed 1.1 million times: “A walkable ASCII-style cyberpunk city in a single HTML file”:
In the video, Rhys explains:
I wanted to see if I could create a city that feels alive but is built entirely from ASCII characters. The idea was to create something that looks like you’re walking through a world made of data, without it being just a flat, visual image.
He developed the “walking simulation” in a tiny JavaScript engine. Although the world appears surprisingly three-dimensional, it uses neither 3D models nor shaders nor textures—unlike, for example, Unity or the Unreal Engine. Instead, the spatial perspective is visualized through cleverly arranged ASCII characters.
Under the hood, the system is, so to speak, a raster-based 3D world. The city stores the locations of streets, buildings, trees, cars, and people, along with details such as building heights.
Using rays, the system then calculates perspective, size, and depth in every frame. And there are even pedestrians and moving cars bustling about in the ASCII city. The engine also handles their collisions as well as the correct ordering of objects in front of or behind one another.
In the comments below the video, you can feel the enthusiasm for this creative project.
YouTube user jotadirect6372 can already picture the sequel—or rather, the prequel—to Cyberpunk 2077:“Close enough. Welcome back, Cyberpunk 1977“. Zakizdaman immediately envisions a game with this graphics style:”This style would be an incredible fit for a 3D rogue-like remake”and Gun_767 feels instantly transported back in time: “Looks like a fever dream from the ’80s”
Since the video was uploaded, the city has continued to grow rapidly. In addition to a few smoothed-out edges and a longer draw distance, you can now even walk inside the buildings in ASCII-City. There are shops, cafés, offices, and much more, and you can even look out at the city from the windows.
In the future, Rhys might actually turn this little experiment into a game. He’s already thinking about a dialogue system for it. So it might be worth keeping an eye on the project.
