An artist on Tumblr going by the name of “1041uuu” has created a series of gifs that depict life in modern Japan as if it were a 16-bit video game (as spotted by Escape Kit).
What’s striking about these gifs is how they focus on figures either slumped from exhaustion or with their face glued to a screen – whether it’s a smartphone, TV, or laptop. The only exception to this is a gif of a cat chasing a dog around a house.
What connects each of the images is the focus on the mundanity of modern life by focusing on scenes at a quiet take away, a daily commute on a train, and a mostly empty coffee shop.
But, in all of these scenes, there’s plenty of smaller details in the environment that tell us more about the lives of these people. They’re surrounded by adverts, or consumer products, and the blue and green hues hint at the technology surrounding all of them. It seems fitting, then, that these scenes have been created with pixel art that makes it look like a shot from a video game.
You can see the gif for the image above here, while the rest of them are linked below with still images so you can get a preview of them. The artist’s Tumblr page has more gifs and similar art work.
