Journey’s is the best
A couple weeks ago an imgur page was floating around the Internet showing various films with each frame reduced to its average color and represented as a single vertical line in what turn out to be often vibrant barcodes. This is not exactly that same process, but a similar idea as applied to video games.
Alan Zucconi ripped frame data from Let’s Plays of various games. He gives a tutorial how to do it on his site. Instead of taking the average color, his algorithm tabulates all of the colors and arranges them into a vertical slice, giving it more of a painted look than a hard barcode look, but it’s still striking.
My favorite of the bunch is Journey‘s, because it works as a retelling of the game. You can see how it starts in the deserts, treks through the underground, and ends on the snowy peaks, all from one image.
Others are not so pretty. For all the praise Bloodborne gets, it makes for just about the dullest, drabbest barcode. 0rbitalis is also a strange choice, considering how much of it takes place against a black background.
If you like to be surprised, you can browse the images in the gallery below and right-click -> Save As to see which games they come from. Otherwise, hit the imgur link for labeled images.
