The online world of GbBBS is based on the real 1990's Bulletin Board System world. In those days if you had a 300 baud modem, your connection could load about 1 line of text to the screen per second. If you had a faster 14,400 or 28,800 baud connection, you could get about half a screen of text per second. This meant that online protocols had to be super optimized to not take up a lot of time downloading. At those speeds, downloading image could take a few minutes. So online menus, posts and UI had to basically be text. But text is boring, In the late 80s, a standard called ANSI was established to send special codes in line with regular text that changed the color of the text. Additionally an extended character sheet was made available to make some rudimentary graphics. 

Soon the members of the underground scene developed their own style of graffiti art utilizing these special characters. With only 16 foreground colors and 8 background colors, the limited palette feels a lot like developing for the Game Boy Color. You can read more about my foray back into the ANSI art of my youth here.

For GbBBS95, I built the BBS screens in ACiDDraw, the original DOS software I used to do art on in 1996. I had to run it on a DOS emulator, and there were some file management issues and other fun stuff that comes with emulating ancient tech. Afterwards the images were run through a ANSI2PNG program which just so happened to support 160x144 resolution. 

Here's the original GbBBS95 logo in ANSI art..

...and its in-game equivalent.

Here's some other ANSI Art commissions I did: