Member of the #anonymous80saficionados here

Hello Steemians,

I grew up in the 80s and 90s and got hooked on the games of that era. We didn't have a console at home, so I would go to the shopping center in our town to play Super Mario World and what other games they would let us kids play.
Luckily we got a PC in '92 and would come across the many great Lucas Arts games. Ever since, retro gaming would have a special place in my life. From retro inspired indie games to collecting classic consoles and games I'd get into it all.

Roughly 2 years ago around the 30th birthday of the Sega Master System a friend and I decided to develop a ROM hack for the classic Alex Kidd in Miracle World. A developer by the name of Calindro released an editor called KiddEd a while earlier, that allows you to change pretty much everything you can imagine about the original game - of course to a reasonable degree, given the limitations of the piece of hardware.

So we went ahead and originally just wanted to create maybe one or two extra levels on top of AKiMW as a fun little side project. What we ended up doing was quite the opposite of our initial mission; We had created a total conversion, leaving not a single asset of Alex Kidd in place and even going beyond what the creators of Alex Kidd envisioned. Lucky for us, Calindro proved to be very forthcoming about making a couple of custom changes outside of what's possible in the editor every now and then. Over the years we became friends and more and more custom hacks found their way into our game.

The forest level of our game - Working title Makai Quest

• Here's a short video of that level in action: https://imgur.com/a/nonMU
• Here's the development thread on SMSPower: http://www.smspower.org/forums/16046-MaKaiQuestATotalConversionOfAlexKiddInMiracleWorld

The game is not yet finished, but we've come really far in those past two years.

By now you're probably wondering what my part is in this project; Pixel Art 👾. I started learning about and practicing pixel art in the wake of our project. It's some kind of a zen experience for me to place single pixels by hand and moving them around to see the thing come to life with just moving a pixel one unit up or down, left or right.

The attentive reader might - rightfully - interject that retro games are only one aspect of 80s love and I'd have to agree on that front. It goes without mention that I deeply adore 80s movies and routinely watch my favorites every other year. As to music, I discovered a strong love for Synthwave/Retrowave some four years ago. What genre is that, you might ask. Welp, it's the music from Stranger Things, but they're hardly the ones having invented the genre.

If you're interested to check it out, I'll leave you with this little mixtape: https://soundcloud.com/lazerdiscsrecords/sets/drive-radio-selection-volume-1

Oh btw, since people upload images of themselves around here. That's me.

All right, that's it from me. If you have questions about me or our game, fire away!

Cheers,
Philipp