Pixter 8-Bit Pixel Art

Time to talk about Pixter, the hand-held Fisher-Price creativity system; a digital art studio, music machine, camera, and video game console all in one. Manufactured from 2000-2007, Pixter is the first and only handheld gaming console produced by Fisher-Price. It's also the first digital touch screen toy for kids, making it an important addition to the world of digital art. Controlled with a tethered stylus, Pixter, is pre-loaded with drawing activities and games, and offers a number of additional cartridges, both licensed and original. As a contract artist, I helped design some of the base unit's activities, cartridge games, and 8-bit animations.

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REVISED EDTION ON SALE JANUARY 2, 2023

The first Pixter was a B&W unit with limited memory storage. All the artwork, or art assets, had to be simple and easily recognizable. That can be tough when you are trying to make a dinosaur using a 19x13 pixel area! That's exactly 247 pixels, which sounds like a lot, but it's really not. When you consider a small 800x600 pixel photograph is 480,000 pixels, 19x13 is pretty small!

For each job I would receive a highly detailed art matrix to follow. The matrix contained specs on sizes, colors, and functionality for each art asset. If the image did not move, it was "static." If it had limited two-frame animation, it was a "toggle image." Larger full screen animations were simply defined as "20 frame animation" and so on. Within these tight guidelines, there was still room for for me to make adjustments to the sizes as long as they did not effect the gameplay.

These art assets were created in an 8-bit format. If you're familiar with early video games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong, their art assets are comprised are individual squares known as pixels which give a jagged edge to perceived lines and curves in 8-bit art. I'm not a computer programmer, so I'll give you the Wiki definition:

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"8-bit color graphics are a method of storing image information in a computer's memory or in an image file, so that each pixel is represented by 8-bits (1 byte). The maximum number of colors that can be displayed at any one time is 256 or 2."

All B&W Pixter images are displayed in 2 colors – black and white (the white being the empty space of the view screen) on an 80x80 working area. When early digital games moved into color, the palette would often be very limited, sometimes only 8, 16, or 32 colors, with some of these colors being almost identical. My early 8-bit art was done this way, and I can tell you, it could be tough sometimes to make it all look nice. Luckily, by the time Fisher-Price released the Color Pixter, we were using 128 colors with a 160x160 working area. The artwork was a lot easier to make. But, despite the increased size and color of the working area, I particularly love B&W 8-bit animation. One pixel to the left or right could be the difference between a happy bunny or a sad bunny.

Over the course of eight years Fisher-Price released six variations of Pixter:

Pixter B&W 80x80 screen.
Pixter Plus 10 additional activities and 20x storage.
Pixter 2.0 Wirelessly send images to another Pixter 2.0.
Color Pixter 128 colors 160x160 screen.
Pocket Pixter Keychain-sized B&W 80x80 screen.
Pixter Multi-Media Now with video editing.
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Over the course of ten years, I worked on a number of Fisher-Price 8-bit animated games, not all Pixter. While working on these games, I developed the standard practice that was adopted by Fisher-Price for fast review of animated assets. This meant a bit more work on my end as I had to construct each animation frame into a single file that was playable with just one click. This came in handy not only for simple animations, but to mock up a non-interactive version of the actual gameplay for the programmers to review. It greatly increased the speed of the review process, allowed me to see how the animations would look, and allowed me to make adjustments.

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I shot this video to show you the consoles and some highlights from three games. I decided to use the COLOR PIXTER game unit as it has a brighter screen with better contrast. It just looks better when shooting a video. But, despite this, I still prefer the original B&W PIXTER.

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There are over 24 B&W Pixter game cartridges. Along with other artists, I helped out on several of them, supplying art support for specific game segments. ​Here are a few of them:

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DINO DRAW

Dinosaur Mix-Up lets kids make there own unique dinosaur with  different dinosaur parts–heads, eyes, mouths, arms, legs, tails, bellies, and skins, plus funny accessories like hats and mustaches.

Dinosaur Scene Starters has different prehistoric and comical backgrounds where kids can stamp different dinos, trees, and bones to create a fun scene.

​Dino Dig is a fossil finding game. Using a flashing scope moved with the stylus, kids search through a prehistoric world looking for bones. The dig goes underground through a geological cross section of the Earth, and once bones are discovered, they are placed on a screen to make a full dinosaur fossil that comes to life!

What's For Dinner Dino? lets kids guess what dinosaurs eat – plants, or meat. If you give the T-Rex vegetables, he sticks out his tongue and makes a "yuck" face.

NOTE: Two years after the release of Dino Draw, I recreated all the art assets for the new Pixter Color console.

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MUSIC STUDIO

Build-a-Band Kids select a background and stamp animated music playing characters in to a scene to create a funny band.

Sound Sprites Kids stamp musical moving images and play them by touching each sprite with the stylus.

Musical Memory A musical version similar in play to the electronic Simon game.

Instrument Mix-up A digital music mixing studio where you mix your own song using twenty different musical stampers. The scrolling mixing board can handle twenty different sound sprites on each of its twelve sections for a total of 240 musical sounds! Press play and you can hear your musical masterpiece! It even has an option to save your creation.

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MONSTER SHOP

Scary Animator Kids select a background, then choose monster stamps to create a fun scene. Selected monsters will animate and make noises.

Mystery Monsters A dot-to-dot activity where a monster outline is made by clicking on blinking dots. When completed, the monster appears and "comes to life!"

It's Alive! An assembly line of monster body parts. Kids select heads, arms, and bodies to create their own monster. When completed, the monster is reviewed by a panel of judges who rate the monster on a scale of 1-10.

Haunted Hide & Seek  You walk through a haunted house looking for a hidden object. There are eight rooms with 36 views, surprise monsters, trap doors, and more!

Monster Scare Down Two monsters are selected in a competition for scariest monster. Each monster animates and does its best to frighten the audience who hopefully reacts with raised hair and loud screams.

Make a Monster This game is like a paper flip book of three body parts: a head, body, and feet. Kids can design monsters, stamp, draw, and erase them.

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STORY COMPOSER Kids would choose a theme, characters, and props, then write their own captions on each page to stage a story of their own. I created three of the ten different story themes– a pirate adventure, a murder mystery, and a horror story. I really liked working on this game cartridge as it was a chance to do lots of fun characters while leaving the stories up to the kids!

In addition to Story Composer, I also supplied art support for the cartridges Arcade, Learning Fun, and Toy Designer.

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Pixter Plus and Pixter 2.0 television commercials.

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POCKET PIXTER, as the name implies, is a very small version of the classic B&W Pixter unit, but with limited game play. Like the original Pixter, it has an 80x80 screen resolution but at half the physical size, so the artwork looks sharper and more detailed. Of the five units released, I supplied art support for Digital Pets and DinoRaptor (another variation on the Dino Draw theme.)

It was inevitable, given the success of the B&W PIXTER, that Fisher-Price would release COLOR PIXTER three years later. I supplied some base unit artwork, stampers, and backgrounds. There are over 30 game cartridges for this console, but I only designed one of them – the updated Dino Draw. Gameplay and images were identical to its predecessor, but with double the resolution and a 128 color palette.

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I also did some of the base unit artwork for the PIXTER DIGITAL CAMERA, a plug in cartridge that allowed kids to take photos with the Color Pixter unit. More than just a camera, it had fun backgrounds and stampers included. Fisher-Price also made a gooseneck light that attached to the B&W Pixter.

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The last console to be released was PIXTER MULTI-MEDIA. It had the ability to play and edit videos. Before I began writing this article, I was unaware that I had worked on this toy! I remember being contracted for some vector-based artwork that was to be turned into Adobe Flash animated games. I saw some of them offered as free playable games on the Fisher-Price website, so I thought that was it.  Turns out some stamps and games that I helped design, Box Out, Concentration, Cube Match, and Snake were included in the Pixter Multi-Media base unit. I don't believe it runs on Flash, but rather the vector art was translated into pixels.

With a list price of of almost $90, the Pixter Multi-Media was competing with higher end hand-held units like the Nintendo DS. The Pixter Multi-Media was available for only one year. After an eight year run, the Fisher-Price Pixter line ended. Around this time, most 8-bit video games were considered "too old" and a whole new world of high-end graphics took their place.

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Although my 8-bit art career was over with Fisher-Price, I was fortunate to continue work in the video gaming industry, supplying much more highly detailed art for three casino-themed online games in 2017 for an online gaming company. 

As computer graphics evolved, the 8-bit video game became a bit of a relic, but it's obvious that people still love this style of art. I like to think of it as "retro," a nice trendy word for "old, but still cool." I miss the 8-bit world. It had an innocence to it – a unique look and gameplay that is not present in many of the slick video games of today. Maybe it's because I spent hours playing the Telstar Pong console, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and the Commodore 64. There's something so appealing and fun about limited pixel art.