Someone built a 3D cyberpunk city entirely from ASCII characters, and it's shockingly impressive

Credit: Grow Now Games / YouTube Published Aug 19, 2026, 1:19 PM EDT Patrick O'Rourke is XDA's News Editor and Entertainment Segment Lead. Previously, he was Pocket-lint's Editor-in-Chief, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian tech publication MobileSyrup, and earlier in his career, he worked as the technology editor at the Financial Post and Postmedia. He's based in Toronto. Over the past 15 years, he's written thousands of articles. Patrick has also interviewed dozens of tech industry executives and covered GDC, E3, Gamescom, WWDC, Apple keynotes, Samsung Unpacked events and more. Patrick has a BA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sign in to your XDA account Summary This stunning cyberpunk city is built entirely from ASCII characters, with impressive 3D depth and atmosphere. The engine raycasts every frame to compute perspective, depth, and collisions, then renders the world in text. The project is a work-in-progress, and more atmosphere, detail, and interaction is coming from its solo developer. As far as ASCII art goes, this is one of the most impressive projects I've ever seen. Solo developer Grow Now Games created a demo of a futuristic cyberpunk city built entirely with ASCII characters (via @Gizmodo). In a YouTube video showing off the project, its creator explains that they wanted "to create something that looks like you're walking through a world made of data without it being just a flat visual image." If this makes you immediately think of The Matrix, you aren't alone — remember the iconic green code that constructed that world? The ASCII city also feels like it has a lot in common with Cyberpunk 2077 (in the YouTube video's comments, someone calls it "Cyberpunk 1977"). For those who are unaware, ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It's a character encoding standard that was originally designed to represent text with numbers. In the context of ASCII art, images or graphics are created using standard text characters, including letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols, rather than pixels or textures, like in most digital art or video games. The ASCII 3D effect is very impressive The project's creator says that they plan to add more to the walkable city In the video's description, Grow Now Games explains that "Every frame, the engine raycasts from the camera to work out perspective, depth, collisions, and what should be visible, then draws it all using letters, numbers, and symbols." It's basically a tiny 3D city made entirely from blocks that can be viewed through a screen of ASCII characters. Grow Now Games says that the project is still a work in progress and that they plan to continue "pushing the atmosphere, detail, and interaction" further. Would I want to play an entire game with this visual style? Probably not, but it's definitely very cool to see in action, particularly as the sprawling skyscrapers and vehicles shift while Grow Now Games walks around from a first-person perspective.