Pizzatoe

One of the great mysteries of 21st century ANSI art is: what was the deal with Pizzatoe, where did they come from and where did they go?

While there has always been a certain degree of background radiation interest in ANSI from outsider communities (notably ENDOOM artists, ZZT designers and 8bitMUSH players), by and large it is extraordinary for them to establish crews and explicitly plan to release artpacks, but kicking down the gates of social media (first Twitter, then BlueSky and Tiktok), the Pizzatoe nation trumpeted to all and sundry that they were here to do just that.

Again, most text art crews are typically primarily populated and led by veterans of the North American/European/South American BBS-era underground artscene from the 1990s, revisiting past glories in a curious kind of historical re-enactment, and while we know that Big 5 / Shift-JIS "AA" text art communities in East Asia are definitely A Thing, they are the kind of thing that we don't typically enjoy much overlap with in practice. Pizzatoe was apparently entirely composed of genuine newcomers to our practice, based in East Asia, rapidly and voluminously drawing ANSI and ASCII art in novel and naive styles often without artscene precedent. They reached out to us, as up-and-coming peers, and we were excited to see what kind of new energy this fresh blood was going to bring to the scene.

But first, they had some guest appearances to make. We presented works by Pizzatoe artists Amy and Momo, plus their spokesperson Jackey, in the MIST1024 artpack collection. Then, more in MIST-30. Finally, they also represented the following year in LAZ20. They announced plans to release their debut artpack proper in Autumn of 2025, a collection dedicated to tributes to favorite video games and movies, and Mist and Lazarus members sent in guest submissions, to reciprocate. And then, and then, and then... the release was delayed. A few announcements were made acknowledging the delay, and then an abrupt radio silence descended upon the entire venture, seemingly permanently. Member accounts were located on other services such as DeviantArt and Github, but reaching out there with unread, unacknowledged inquiries also simply revealed that it was as though the members had simply walked away from the Internet entirely. Our best theory has it that they were collectively hit by a bus -- a very large bus.

During their year on social media, Pizzatoe left an incredible wealth of documentation, and there are even fragments of their artpack-in-progress floating around out there in cyberspace. On the socials they were always very clear to assert that their creations were Creative Commons licensed CC0, basically free for any kind of use by anyone, so possibly we have not yet seen the last of their work, whether or not they themselves ever emerge from the woodwork to explain why they all suddenly disappeared overnight.

Pizzatoe formal membership consisted of: Jackey, Momo, Amy, Simon, and Buchemer.