The Great Giana PETSCII Sisters

An art project in shape of a little game as a tribute to the Great Giana Sisters drawn in pure PETSCII (Commodore PET ASCII). The game includes an interpretation of the famous intro and, it contains several day and night levels with ascending difficulty. Even an end sequence exists. Everything is accompanied with wonderful interpretations of Chris Hülsbeck's music by fieserWolf and remixes by SigmaSeven. The code was done by Wil and the PETSCII art was created by Logiker.  

History

Everything started with a PETSCII interpretation of the Bernie Sanders meme. Back then, Bernie Sanders appeared everywhere, so why he shouldn't appear on the C64 as well? When the picture was done, a typical C64 background was needed. And that's how all started. As background, I decided to use Giana Sisters, as it´s maybe one of the most typical games for the C64.

The next idea was to create a small demo around this picture. It would be cool to have some scrolling and to let Giana move around if possible. Step by step more ideas arose.  Why not to let Giana be controlled by a joystick? How about adding some opponents? The idea got bigger and bigger. More levels should be created. An intro should be added and, it wouldn't be complete without an end sequence. 

So, starting from a simple meme picture, the idea turned into an intro and finally into a playable demo.

Actually, we never had the plan to create a copy of Giana Sisters with PETSCII. It was all a pure work of art as tribute to the game itself, and not a demake or something similar.

FAQ

Why is the game not as large as the original?

That is simple. It was never planned to be a real game but as a piece of art. As such, it is already much more playable than ever planned.

Why are the sprites so huge?

Which sprites? There are no sprites! Everything consists out of pure PETSCII characters, which are obviously much larger than pixels, so are the figures.

A Vintage Computing Carinthia production in 2022.