If you grew up with an Apple IIe in the classroom, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That green glow. That hum. The way your eyes felt like they’d been sandblasted after an hour of staring at monochrome green text on black.
MECC — the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium — made the games that ate our childhoods. Oregon Trail. Lemonade Stand. Number Munchers. Odell Lake. We weren’t just playing games, we were getting educated and we didn’t even care, because trying to ford the river without drowning your entire party was more intense than anything on TV.
I burned my eyes up on those monitors. Hours. The green phosphor would sear itself into your vision — you’d walk away from the computer and still see green ghosts floating in front of your eyes. And we’d go right back the next day for more.
That’s what I wanted to capture with the runner banner on this site. Not just retro for retro’s sake, but a real memorial to that specific feeling: chunky pixel characters sprinting across a green-phosphor CRT, the way we saw them back then. Every sprite in that banner is hand-built in the Apple IIe style — monochrome green, chunky pixels, the whole deal.
The Casts
I didn’t want just one loop. I wanted channels, like flipping through different games. So the banner rotates through casts, one full loop each.
Fallout. Lucy, Vault-Boy, and Dogmeat running from a giant scorpion. Then the scorpion comes back the other way with Maximus chasing it, guns blazing. Post-apocalyptic, obviously. The scorpion’s run cycle might be the most authentic thing I’ve ever made — eight legs, proper scuttle, no shortcuts.
Mystery Gang. My original take on the meddling-kids formula — a redhead, the leader, the smart one, a Great Dane, and a beatnik. They’re running from the same scorpion (it gets around). On the way back, the flower-power van chases the scorpion down, with the leader visibly driving. The Dane’s gallop took three tries to get right. The first version looked like it was humping. We don’t talk about the first version.
Dungeon Crawler. A cat in a tiara, a goblin crawler, and the scorpion again. On the return trip, the crawler’s on a full steampunk chopper — front wheel, handlebars, wind-trailing cloak, steel gauntlets — with the cat riding his shoulder. Because why not.
Aliens Part 1. Ripley, Newt, and a tabby cat running from a facehugger. On the way back, a baby xenomorph chases them. The baby went through three designs — the first was a shrunken adult (wrong), the second was chibi with a floating head (also wrong), the third finally nailed it: oblong head, boney ribs, Newt-sized.
Aliens Part 2. This one’s a full cinematic. The adult xenomorph chases everyone while Bishop leads them out. Then they come back, Ripley hits a wall button that opens a portal to space, the trio clears the frame, halved Bishop crawls in and hits the lower button, and he and the xenomorph get sucked into the void. Portal closes. Roll credits.
Why
Because those MECC games weren’t just games. They were the first time a computer felt like a window into another world, even if that world was green and made of blocky pixels. Every kid who waited their turn at the classroom Apple IIe knows.
This banner’s my love letter to that. Modern sci-fi characters, but in the spirit of MECC — running forever across that green glow, the way they should.
My eyes still burn a little. Worth it.