Chun-Li in Forty Polygons
Zelda rendered in flat triangles. Chun-Li with her buns broken down into clean geometric planes. Mega Man reduced to his essential shape and color. Canadian illustrator Michael Firman takes characters I’ve been looking at since childhood and runs them through a low-poly prism, and the strange thing is how much personality survives the reduction.
The polygon aesthetic has been around long enough that it now carries its own nostalgia—early PlayStation, the N64’s blocky corners—but Firman uses it differently. His work is colorful and deliberate, closer to graphic illustration than retro game art. The characters don’t look like they belong to an older console; they look like icons. Something essential, distilled down to what makes them recognizable in the first place.
Beyond Nintendo’s roster, his portfolio pulls in figures from Star Wars, Moana, and Game of Thrones, which says something about the scope of what counts as shared visual culture now. Everything that’s become a franchise is eligible for reinterpretation. The interesting question, looking at this work, is which characters actually survive abstraction—which ones have a shape strong enough to hold up when you strip everything away. Most of Firman’s choices answer that question well.
His Instagram is the natural home for this kind of work. One image at a time, no noise.