# Some notes about Pico-8

## Excerpt from essay by Amelia Crouch commissioned by Freelands Foundation

In his work Street uses the ‘fantasy console’ Pico8, a “software that pretends to be an old piece of hardware.” Such emulators – Street tells me – are a common way for people to play retro games. Pico8’s quirk is that it mimics a 1980s games console that never actually existed. Street asserts: “I love the sense of an alternate history.” The software was designed to trouble the hyper-masculine associations that have pervaded gaming since the 1980s. With its soft-hued, 16-colour palette (three shades of which are pink) Pico8 employs design choices socially coded as feminine.

Pico-8 is a "fantasy console" created by Joseph White, known as Zep online, an indie developer living in Tokyo - this and other work by Zep is available at Lexaloffle.com. Mouse control is possible to some extent in parts of the pieces shown here, but generally it's more fun to use a retro game controller.

This fantasy console appealed to me in part because all aspects of game development can be carried out within the Pico-8 program, avoiding the need to acquire and learn separate software tools for music, sound, graphics, and programming. It offers a highly stylised and somewhat exaggerated experience of 1980s home computing, with a screen resolution of just 128 x 128 pixels. By offering creative constraints on screen size and memory (though I've never made anything complex enough to tax the memory allowance) Pico-8 is a kind of miniaturisation of the computer as an artefact. This is arguably opposite to how the term "miniaturisation" is normally used in computing - instead of fitting more into a smaller chip, Pico-8 goes in the other direction, offering a constrained capacity regardless of the host device.

After I made the Computer Petting Zoo, but before I started the artist-in-residence programme in Japan, Zep added a feature to Pico-8 that mimics the dither patterns used to facilitate tonal shading, particularly useful for ambitious developers who have created 3D games in Pico-8. In part due to the low resolution of the screen, these patterns brought to my mind textile weaving practices - an appealing connection that connects to historiographies of technology that consider the Jacquard loom to be the first computer. Rather than using the dither patterns for 3D graphics, I used them to generate designs in collaboration with textile artist Anne Smithies, for installations of the Interactive Portraits.