You're looking at a video game stripped down to its colors, frame-by-frame

Sometimes it feels like the game you're playing rushes by in the blink of an eye. But I'd wager you've never seen a blink quite so lovely as the painterly "barcodes" created by Alan Zucconi. What you see in the header image and gallery above are games, broken down frame by frame and reformed into a single, wide image - almost like a bird's eye view of playing them from start to finish.

Journey and Fez are particularly striking, and it's really neat how you can almost come up with your own retelling of the former just by the way the colors shift. I also like Titan Souls for its clear separation of fights and exploration. Fallout 4, despite its wider color palette, still looks mighty dreary, and I never noticed just how brown The Witcher 3 apparently is. Must be all the leather.

Though his works are inspired by an Imgur album that compresses famous movies into a series of vertical lines with each bar representing a frame's average color, Zucconi's game barcodes differ in that they do not focus on one single average color, but instead combine all colors into each slice. Since games are experienced differently from player to player, Zucconi sourced his data from various Let's Play videos. It sounds complicated, but it's really not. In fact, Zucconi has a tutorial on his website so you can create your own barcodes.

As for me, I just want a high-quality print so I can frame and hang it in the living room.

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