8-Bit Bikini

This is a piece I just finished called 8-Bit Bikini that pays tribute to the end of the first Metroid game for the NES. This of course was one of the famous moments in gaming (for people my age, anyway) where upon beating the game you had your mind blown to learn that Samus was a woman. This was at a time when female characters in games were still pretty much relegated to being rescued. If you worked extra hard at this already very difficult game you could get different endings, and the hardest to obtain rewarded you with an image of the tiny Samus sprite wearing only a pixelated bikini:



It seems funny now that we would have worked so hard to see this image, what with all the advances in video games graphics (and sexuality.)

I wanted to keep all the references in the drawing a secret to see if anyone would bring them up, but I'm also impatient so I'll explain them anyway. It'll be your reward for reading all this text in a post about a pin-up drawing!

The text at the top of the piece is the last line of the typical "you have beaten the game!" message that hovers above Samus right before she waves goodbye with an amazing two frames of animation. Scrawled on the rock in the background is "Justin Bailey wuz here," which is a reference to the famous Justin Bailey code. If you entered that name on the password screen you would start the game with all power ups and play as Samus in her jumpsuit (and with green hair.) Nerds still argue over the origin of the code and the meaning behind it, but it has pretty much been cracked that the series of letters are just a coincidence, as entering several more random sequences of letters can get you the same result.

And my signature is in a shape that should be recognizable...

I love it that knowing this stuff is part of my job. I'm hoping to turn this into a print.