Mistigris artpacks at a glance
While reflecting on the Mistigris role on the 604 area code art scene, I dug deep into our archives and curated a selection of files, not necessarily our most signature pieces, but ones that effectively illustrate specific key trends, styles, techniques, mediums, and influences in the historical underground PC art scene, as seen in Mistigris artpacks. Where possible, I’ve prioritized works by Canadian artists, with a preference for earlier examples. Because the significance of these files isn’t always immediately obvious, I’ve included brief explanatory blurbs with each selection. The files have been renamed with prefixes indicating the artpack in which they were originally released, most of which include the month and year in their titles. In some cases, I’ve also linked to YouTube videos demonstrating executable files in action.
Enjoy!
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mist1094-33-PAB3.ANS ANSI art logo by Eerie (David Turgeon), created to celebrate the ANSI art editor "Pablo". Originally developed by Minus of Mistigris, Pablo was first shared with the public in our debut artpack collection, MIST1094. At the time, any art group that wanted to be taken seriously had to offer its own dedicated ANSIvis viewer program in their artpacks, but we went a step further, becoming the first, after ACiD, to offer its own dedicated ANSI editor. Pablo passed from Minus' hands into Eto's, who continues to actively maintain and improve it to this day. For more information on historical versions of Pablo, visit: https://mistigris.org/pablo/pindex.html. |
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mist1094-AY-MI-F&.BIN Pablo creator Minus and his brother AY worked together on this ANSI art advertisement for Fast & Furious BBS (aka Infinite Dreams). What makes this file extraordinary is that it is an extra-wide (beyond the standard 80 columns) ANSI scroller saved in TheDraw as a .BIN. |
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mist1094-CT-ENTRO.LIT This ANSI art file doesn't show an illustration but rather tells a story in rhyming poetry. In the early years of the underground PC art scene, these lits were a respected and legitimate form of creative expression within the community. But even then, the scale was tipping toward ANSI art and away from lit. Note the dark "mature" approach and meta cyberpunk subject (area code 604 was also home to Neuromancer author William Gibson, and Cthulu — poet Rowan Lipkovits — sure knew it!) engaged by the teenage author. This poem simulates a modem connection and line noise. |
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mist1094-FILE_ID.DIZ This piece is a sort of internal metadata used in PKZIP archives, allowing BBSes to tap the zip file and auto-populate the description field explaining what was just uploaded to its file bases. To ensure compatibility with a wide variety of BBS-hosting software, DIZ files had screen column width limitations and traditionally needed to be saved as raw text with no use of ANSI colors. In the public domain BBS sphere, FILE_IDs often consisted of plain text descriptions of files. But in the underground art scene, the artists usually made text art logos representing their crew. This particular example was drawn by Eerie, our original hype man from area code 418. |
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mist1094-IQ-MSG.ANS A classic example of ANSI art screen in its typical context, this sample BBS menu was drawn by Inquisitor and features Opus the Penguin from the Bloom County comic strip. |
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mist1094-MA-KTCH1.ANS This ANSI art logo by Mavrik (by Mike Fisher, who used it from his Daemon's Gate BBS) hypes up "KiTSCHNet", Mistigris' official FIDONet-style inter-BBS echomail network. The network was supported by all Mistigris member boards (BBSes run by members) and distro sites (unaffiliated BBSes that reliably carried the latest Mist artpacks). Late at night, BBSes would shut down to public human traffic during network mail hours (typically 1-2 am) and call each other to sync updates to their shared echomail message bases. |
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mist1094-ZR-US1.ANS This ANSI art screen, created by Zoltar for BBS use, features "MCI codes" — programmatic abbreviations (e.g., %UN = [USERNAME]) that specific BBS software would be able to replace with real user data. This stats screen, when displayed to a logged-in user, would show the current user's actual statistics instead of those placeholder codes. This piece also demonstrates one of the main influences on ANSI art style and subject matter. While Image Comics dominated the scene, there was a vein of inspiration from Japanese manga and anime, especially via France and, in this case, Quebec. |
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mist1094-TZ-SO1.PC This VGA bitmap by Tzeentch (Jamu Kakar) promotes Sweet Oblivion BBS. The use of the term VGA denoted high-resolution graphics in 256 colors or more, to distinguish itself from the Hercules monochrome, 4-colour CGA and 16-colour EGA graphics still in use on PCs at that time. (ANSI art was all drawn using the 16-color EGA palette, in interleaved combinations of foreground and background colours.) Images like this one were drawn in graphics editors such as Deluxe Paint 2, but as far as high-resolution graphics goes, early artpacks also featured home raytracing efforts, explorations into fractal imagery, and later on, extensive experimentation with Photoshop filters. |
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mist1094-KITSCH-8.ZIP This sample file comes from the echomail infopack, which contains information pertinent to '90s BBS SysOps (system operators) interested in joining KiTSCHNet. |
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mist1094-MISTVIEW.EXE A screenshot of Mistigris' exclusive, dedicated file viewer MistView created by Minus. It's fairly bare-bones, but it does exactly what it promises. While art groups often felt compelled to include custom viewers in their artpacks, if only to prove they had enough programming muscle at the table to keep up with the pack, most home users simply used whichever viewer they preferred, with ACiDview often regarded as the "best in category." It can be viewed in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrbR8JqeAhQ |
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mist1194-DT-WAST1.ANS This ANSI art screen by Diamond Traveler, from area code 418, is a prime example of a “scroller”—an ANSI piece extending beyond the standard 50 lines. While any BBS could display such a digital tapestry, creating one was no small feat in the days before the widespread adoption of ACiD’s ACiDDraw editor. Artists had to manually stitch together 25- or 50-line segments, hoping they aligned seamlessly. |
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mist1194-MA-SL1.ANS Mavrik drew this ANSI art scroller for Salem's Lot BBS at the request of its SysOp Helter, who had decorated his BBS in shades of green and was always fishing for more green art to match it. It includes "greets" in the header, with brief messages and shout-outs from the artist, along with Mavrik’s stylized virtual "signature" atop the piece |
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mist1194-QT-NM94.PCX This VGA image by Questor (Carlton Chan) promotes the 1994 installment of the "New Media" demoparty, hosted by computer science students at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Graphical demos were projected on a large auditorium screen, and attendees competed for prizes donated by local sponsors, including Advanced Gravis Computer Technology of Burnaby, BC. |
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mist1194-ZR-ST2.ANS This ANSI art screen by Zoltar, from area code 418, celebrates Eerie's BBS Sarcastic Toaster with an original illustration (not a comic rip) of Spawn — Image Comics’ hero, and the single most popular ANSI art subject. |
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mist1294-ZR-ST3.ASC This ASCII art logo by Zoltar, created for Sarcastic Toaster, is drawn in "old school" Amiga style, with an emphasis on outlines. Amiga computers' character set allowed the use of non-alphanumeric characters to draw these outlines and align them seamlessly. On a PC, however, those same characters were often rendered with gaps between characters. Many PC-based computer art fans whiled away the entirety of the '90s without ever realizing that they had been viewing these files not as intended by their creators. . |
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mist1294-MSTAPP11.ZIP A screenshot of the Mistigris "application generator". This application program demonstrates an underground computer art crew's surplus of programming talent at hand, inviting interested parties to fill out an application to become part of that crew. After the user answered all of the questions and enjoyed the computer music, the program would generate a text file for the user to upload to a BBS affiliated with the crew. This generator was programmed by Dr. CPU and scored by Admiral Skuttlebutt. |
| mist0195-RV95EPNX.MOD This tracker module represents a cross between two schools of computer music, with a song initially composed by Admiral Skuttlebutt of Digitallusions on the MIDI-ready studio stalwart Atari ST. It was then remixed by the Amiga-slinging Marauder of EuphoniX between rave engagements. |
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mist0195-TNT-LOGO.ANS This set of unrelated short ANSI screens by The Naughty Tycoon from area code 418, is what was described as a "colly" or "logocolly". While a standard etymology might suggest that it's short for "collection", I've always liked to imagine it derives from "collé" — virtually glued together) —suggesting a series of small ANSI art illustrations. These digest-style compilations typically featured logos (often referred to as “fonts”), and were combined into one longer file to avoid cluttering up the artpack with too many small entries, enhancing the user's viewing experience. |
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mist0395-LI-THA!.RIP This RIPscrip vector art illustration was drawn by The Lite for The Heretic Asylum. A member of Fire Graphics—a like-minded crew based in Georgia, USA—The Lite joined Mistigris briefly during a merger with Mist in March 1995. RIPscrip was the BBS world's pet vector graphics format (comparable to Telidon's NAPLPS, ReGIS, Tektronix, CTX, etc.), offering a small file size (and hence a shorter file transfer time) than bitmaps by storing not the complete image information, but instructions as to how the viewer's computer could reproduce the steps needed to draw the completed image. At low modem speeds, viewers could watch the artist go through all the steps of drawing the image as though sitting on their shoulder, complete with revisions and creative changes of mind mid-way. While a few BBS door games supported RIPscrip, the format was far more prominent in artpacks than in everyday BBS use. RIPscrip screens are not to be confused with "rips", plagiarized computer art, or "comic rips", direct adaptations of illustrations from comic books. |
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mist0495-MIST0495.MEM When possible, Mistigris included its standard member list and newsletter infofiles within their Kithe, our electronic magazine. However, there were times when the information needed to be shared before the program was ready for release. Here is a rare specimen of a member list, standard fare for most art groups in the underground computer art scene. It was drawn by Nitnatsnoc. |
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mist0495-DP-GRAF.GIF The graffiti style phenomenon is not well represented in the typography of '90s Mistigris artpacks, but its influence grew steadily through the '90s, as reflected in the creative output of the underground art scene. (Back in the '90s, .GIF was merely a relatively unlossy bitmap format with no assumptions of being animated, merely a cloud of suspicion that its unlicensed use might bring down legal action from Unisys and CompuServe.) This "throwing up a wall" high-resolution graphics scene is the handiwork of one Deadpool, another visitor to Mist via Fire Graphics. (At the time, the .GIF format was simply a relatively unlossy bitmap format—not yet well-known for animation—and often surrounded by legal concerns over its unlicensed use by Unisys and CompuServe.) This high-resolution “throwing up a wall” graffiti-style graphic is the work of Deadpool, a contributor who joined Mistigris through Fire Graphics. |
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mist0695-XE-FW.ANS This ANSI art illustration by Xeryrus—then-Ontario-based artist and now a Yukon-based First Nations designer Mark Rutledge—advertising Force Works BBS, is an excellent demonstration of "toon" style shading of high-intensity vs. low-intensity colors denoting highlights and shading rather than leaning primarily on the two-tone dithered characters typically used for these purposes. Despite the prevalence of "comic rips" as the subjects of ANSI scrollers, this piece is original artwork, born from the artist’s original ideas. At the time, such images were sometimes called a "freehand", "FANSI" (for "freehand ANSI") or, extremely rarely, as "FART". |
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mist0895-MLK-FLAG.EXE This simple "waving flag" demonstration program by Melkor illustrates the underground PC art scene's traditional ties to the demoscene. Usually, this kind of display might have been seen crammed in front of a cracked warez file (a computer game with broken copy protection, distributed by organized software pirates boasting about their prowess with garish multimedia displays). The genre of small programs yielding brief visual effects has been described as "loaders" or "intros", or when bundled with cracks, "cracktros". It can be seen in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo-nAiuV8CU |
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mist0296-KM-HOOD.ANS While a thriving "Big 5" textmode art scene existed on Taiwan’s massive PTT telnet BBS, the appearance of Chinese ideograms in ANSI art was an “only in Vancouver” phenomenon, demonstrated with this example of 604's Kurama in this advertisement for The Hood BBS |
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mist2yr1-JG-MIST1.ANS This scroller promotes a good cause: when you can't figure out which BBS to make your ANSI art illustration an advertisement for, just make it a promotion for your crew! Hip-hop flava was flooding the mainstream culture in the '90s and Jughead (Ken Yong) was determined to bring a little bit of that street style to our artpacks, later coining the unique "Mistfunk" nickname we still use on social media today to disambiguate us from competing Mistigris entities and take us out of namespace conflict. |
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mist3yra-M-EIGHTA.ASC With this promo for Eight, Muton offers an excellent demonstration of the "new school" ASCII art style, forgoing traditional line characters in favor of defining positive and negative space and varying grades of texture between them through the use of symbols that fill their cell on the screen to varying degrees. |
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m-9801-3_BARF.ANS This ANSI art logo, celebrating the (now similarly revived) Laz(arus) crew by Lazarus founder Warpus of Ontario and Tricolore of Winnipeg, is a demonstration of both graffiti influence on ANSI art typography and IRC-enabled asynchronous collaboration across great distances. |
| mist1015-ILL-ESHA_LINE-BY-LINE.MP3 A chance high school encounter with Elysha Zaide on the Vancouver School Board's Ed-Net multi-node chat BBS set her on a life path to becoming an internationally renowned drum and bass DJ. In this musical composition, she reflects on her online youth during her BBS days using samples of period computers to evoke the era. |
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mist1116-ILLARTERATE-03_VENDETTA2.EP1 Due to its inability to focus exclusively on ANSI art, Mistigris always had an uneasy relationship with ANSI artists. Following its revival, we explored the world of fellow travelers—aesthetically similar textmode art and pixel art styles--beginning with making the acquaintance of a UK-based Teletext artist, Illarterate (Dan Farrimond), in 2015. Since then, we’ve featured thousands of Teletext screens in our artpacks from the small but thriving Teletext community. |
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mist1016-RAQUEL_MEYERS-AMBUSH_ACIDT.PRG In this guest appearance, international computer art star Raquel Meyers shared a grim and creepy PETSCII work, built around the textmode character set and display limitations of the Commodore 64 home computer. While PETSCII bears surface similarities to ANSI art, its strict limitation of a single background color per screen makes it fundamentally quite different. |
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mist1116-LDA-PRTZ.ANS He arrived at ANSI art from the related extended FANSI format in use illustrating a MUSH, a fellow traveler from the textmode primordial soup of the 20th century. But it's the 21st century now, baby, and Ontario's LDA proudly carries on the Canadian tradition of creating ANSI art. |
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mist0221-MISTIGRIS_PARTY-THE_BIG_PIRANHA.ANS Modern versions of PabloDraw support not only remapped character sets and redefined color palettes (though neither are evident here), but also expanded canvases and simultaneous collaborative ANSI art drawing by multiple artists over networked sessions. Many massive "joints" (collaborative works) such as this one—much higher and less wide--have been masterminded by the UK artist Polyducks (Ben Jones), the ringleader of a loose cadre of pixel artists slumming in ANSI art as "Textmode Friends". You can view this extraordinary "sideways scroller" in full at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2EEjWmx2Eg |
© Rowan Lipkovits