The 8-Bit City


Brooklyn-based interaction designer Brett Camper did some great work with these pretty 8-Bit city maps. The maps are designed with 1980s video games in mind. Oh yes, among the series is a map from Amsterdam, which is featured above. (Scroll down for New York.) Other cities are Austin, Berlin, Detroit, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC. More cities are coming soon…

“The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. This web map was created using a custom rendering engine, with help from several excellent open source software and data packages. The underlying geometry for map features such as roads & parks comes from OpenStreetMap, © by contributors, CC-BY-SA. The snazzy pixel fonts are by the artist Miffies (some have been modified). The map graphics are assembled in Python.”