Yahoo Autos Porsches In Pixels Are Pure Nostalgia
In July of 1985, Commodore launched the Amiga home computer. To hear journalists wax nostalgic over it, and to read the initial reviews, it basically blew the entire world away. Nobody had built a computer with such incredible graphics capabilities. It was not only cheaper than the Apple Macintosh and IBM PCs, but it packed a 4096-color palette, graphics accleration, a custom chipset, and software that endeared it to artists, videographers, and other creatives, many of whom had never thought a computer could ever be useful to them.
(If you want to read an "epic, eight-part series" on the history of the Amiga," may your attention span be less addled than ours.)
Jim Sachs was one of these creatives. The former Air Force veteran had written a few games for the Commodore 64, but he switched to the new Amiga as soon as it came out. (At $1295, plus $300 for the monitor, it wasn't cheap by 1980s standards and would've been over $3500 today.) One of his games, Saucer Attack, featured UFOs attacking a remarkably well-rendered Washington DC; it did moderately well.
Sachs would eventually become the primary artist for Defender of the Crown, a medieval-themed strategy game that pushed the state-of-the-art Amiga to the limits. "Jim Sachs, what a god he is," said video game creator Robert J. Mical, the first time he laid eyes the game at its debut in 1986: "Jim Sachs is amazing. These days everyone sees graphics like that because there are a lot of really good computer graphics artists now, but back then, 20 years ago, it was astonishing to have someone that good." The game transformed him into one of the leading game designers of the Eighties. But before his success with Defender of the Crown, Sachs built up his pixel art prowess by drawing Porsches.
Sachs experimented extensively with the Amiga's Graphicraft software, according to his own bio. His art is showcased at the Amiga Graphics Archive. For work created on a computer with a mere 32 colors, it is remarkable. There are GIFs for scenes from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, mundane office scenes, the Roman Coliseum, and demos for Amiga software. There are screenshots from a seafaring game called Ports of Call. Sachs' vehicular enthusiasm includes an FC Mazda RX-7 and a Kawasaki Ninja 900-but man, did he love his Porsches. Every single Eighties variant of the 911 is there, from coupe to convertible, targa to Turbo, everything but the Flachbau. Phone dials and gold Fuchs and everything! Arguably the best one is the cabrio set against a soft sunset, filled with gauzy and gradient pastels, complete with looming, mustachioed self-portrait hovering in the background. It is the bona-fide granddaddy of vaporwave, and may that wonderful genre rest in peace.
Sachs went on to create one of the most well-known screensavers of the Nineties: Marine Aquarium, a standby of office accounting cubicles everywhere as well as your mother's computer that she only uses to check her Hotmail. Laugh you may, but the talent is still there: it can't be easy getting every pixel in every single coral reef in place. Says designer Dave Seah, who recently rediscovered Sachs' work with gusto, he says: "In the good ole' days of the Amiga, Jim Sachs was one of the artists that defined pixel graphics perfection."
