Blade, also referred to as The Blade Nation, was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI,

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

, and

high resolution Image resolution is the detail an image holds. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies how cl ...

artwork from 1994 to 1997, and during a brief time in 1998.

History

The group was founded in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

by ANSI Artist, Sub Zero. Due to the confusion between many artists with the handle Sub Zero, his name was changed to Mindcrime after the first Blade release. Blade developed a long-standing rivalry with another artscene group headquartered in New Jersey, Creators of Intense Art. In 1996 Blade took part in

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

artscene group Mistigris's World Tour, under which Mistigris released its artwork in other group's artpacks, as opposed to its own.

Releases

Blade released 43 monthly

artpack An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR. While most artpacks today contain either ANSI and ASCII art or ''hirez'' VGA, they may also include a combination of RIPscrip art, tr ...

s beginning with the first "Blade Epic" in March 1994. After the 43rd release, several months passed until the final 44th artpack was released.
Blade Epic #01
(First Epic)
Blade Epic #27
(Mistigris World Tour)
Blade Epic #44
(Final Epic)

External links

Dark Domain
The ACiD Artpacks Archive on DVD ({{ISBN, 0-9746537-0-5), contains all available Blade Epics.
Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and ASCII Art Archive
- A web viewable archive of current and past ANSI and ASCII packs released by the

computer art scene The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork. Early computer art The history of computer art predates the computer art scene for several decades, with the first expe ...

1994 establishments in New Jersey Artscene groups