The art of ASCII art was born out of technical limitations. Artists had to construct recognizable images from a fixed set of characters with the same width, and it was these constraints that gave rise to an aesthetic that still lives on today. Traces of this style can be seen everywhere: in the games Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, in the bulky Unicode text decorations that filled forums in the 2000s, and in the falling green characters from the movie The Matrix. At the same time, the very idea of drawing with letters and numbers continues to evolve. The first ASCII art was flat, because conveying depth using symbols of fixed width is much more difficult than simply assembling a recognizable image. Today, nothing prevents us from bringing character graphics into the third dimension.

That’s exactly what a solo developer known by the nickname Grow Now Games has done. He published a demonstration of his work on YouTube this week. The idea was to create something that looks as if the viewer is walking through a world made of data, but at the same time, it’s not just a flat visual image. The effect turned out to be expressive and most closely resembles the brain‑dance scenes from Cyberpunk 2077, where the worldview breaks down into many separate data streams. Such a visualization would also look good in the upcoming series based on Neuromancer, although depicting cyberspace there will likely cost an astronomical amount and will be much more glossy than the original book requires.

The most interesting thing about the demonstration lies in its technical foundation. The author did not use any 3D models or shaders, that is, the most obvious way to achieve such an effect, which is easy to obtain in programs like Blender. Instead, the world is rendered using its own engine based on raycasting. According to the creator, it’s just JavaScript and Canvas in a single HTML file. The level geometry is built on a grid, just like in the classic Wolfenstein 3D. But if the original from id Software, despite its name, wasn’t fully 3D, here the player, judging by the video, can freely look up and down. In the symbolic city, cars are driving around, semi‑transparent trees stand, and passers‑by are wandering. All of this is made up of signs, but it reads as a volumetric scene. Despite the fact that everything runs on JavaScript and HTML, there is no public version for running in a browser yet. Perhaps the engine is being prepared for use in a real game, because walking through such a cyberpunk 1977 looks like an unusual experience.