Marcel Winatschek

All My Money, Right Now

Say someone walks up to me and asks how much I’d pay for a Street Fighter game on the Super Nintendo where every fighter is a Game of Thrones character and the arenas are all set in Westeros. I wouldn’t have time to answer. I’d already be turning my pockets inside out.

Think about it: Arya versus Joffrey on the rooftops of King’s Landing. Jon Snow trading haymakers with a White Walker in a snow-buried forest below the Wall. Daenerys, inexplicably a karate expert, settling something personal with Littlefinger somewhere in the Essos desert. It writes itself. The fact that it doesn’t exist is a genuine failure of human ambition.

DeviantArt user Orkimides at least got as far as the character sprites—pixel art portraits of the Game of Thrones cast rendered in chunky 16-bit style, the kind that produces an immediate warmth somewhere behind the eyes. The backgrounds don’t exist. The code doesn’t exist. But looking at what’s here, I feel the absence of something that should have been made. Whatever it would have cost, I would have paid it.