This cyberpunk city built from ASCII characters looks straight out of The Matrix

A solo developer known as Grow Now Games has created a demo of a futuristic cyberpunk city built entirely from ASCII characters, and the result is turning heads across the tech and gaming communities. The project was highlighted by Gizmodo and showcases a surprisingly immersive 3D world rendered without a single pixel or texture.

In a YouTube video demonstrating the project, the creator explained that the goal was "to create something that looks like you're walking through a world made of data without it being just a flat visual image." The resemblance to the iconic green code from The Matrix is immediate and intentional — viewers have drawn parallels not only to that film but also to Cyberpunk 2077. One commenter even dubbed the project "Cyberpunk 1977," a nod to the year the ASCII standard was originally published.

The engine behind this ASCII city is no simple trick. It raycasts every frame to compute perspective, depth, and collisions, then renders the world using standard text characters — letters, numbers, punctuation, and symbols — rather than pixels or textures. This approach gives the environment a distinctive, data-driven aesthetic that feels both retro and futuristic.

For those unfamiliar, ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a character encoding standard originally designed to represent text with numbers. ASCII art uses these characters to create images, but this project takes the concept into full 3D, complete with walkable streets and atmospheric lighting effects.

The developer has stated that the project is still a work-in-progress. Plans include adding more atmosphere, detail, and interactive elements to the walkable city. Given the already impressive depth and sense of place, the final version could be a landmark in ASCII-based 3D rendering.