The War of Mascots

Well it seems like reddit is playing host to a barrage of video game characters appearing all over the word on windows and walls in post it notes and chalk. Whether it’s Sonic or Mario, every post seems to be snowballing into yet another picture appearing. Leading to a few back and forth battles turning… musical?, and also inspiring an entire group of engineering students to post it an entire building face. I just wonder where this will go from here.

The first picture that seemed to start things was this post it note of Megaman:

This seemingly innocuous and comical post on reddit seemed to draw more than laughter as the ante was raised as more creations hit the site. Next up was a picture of Mario: which triggered two responses. The first response was comical, the neighbor made a piranha plant, but the second was on another level of WIN.

Window Mario and Response

Next up I don’t think anyone could have imagined: somewhere in the ballpark of 6k post-it notes and the windows of an entire college building gave us this:

A team of devoted students gave us this

If I had to pick some achievement or winner for the category, this one would probably take it no problem, but the first Mario fork gets more interesting as the original maker ‘fires’ back.

Mario Upgrades to the Plant's Dismay

This is of course skipping another step where the plant maker replied with an ‘AH’. This battle actually continued to the point where the creator wrote a song, which I’ll post here;

But the war of art has one last stop in this article: Sonic. Replying to the Mario thread was his former 8-bit rival with blast processing in a new artistic surface of Chalk.

Even though it’s not post-it I still think it’s really freaking impressive and entirely deserving of recognition here.

Of course since the sonic entry there hasn’t been much buzz in the /g/ area of reddit. Has this art craze died out only inspiring a few? I certainly hope not, sure to some it may seem passe after a few weeks, but I think it takes two fun hobbies – or obsessions – and mixes them into something very cool; so, I certainly hope that these four major works are not all we will see. If you look the Video Game Music remix community, it has found definitely stable footing for continuity with sites like OCremix and Dwelling of Duels, and Video Games are clearly preserved in Woot shirt references, comics, and irregularly in Deviant art – so why not public art with Post-Its and Chalk? The internet is one hell of a tool, let’s see how long we can keep this ball rolling.

~Dan