Robert Pfaff is a young illustrator living in Michigan. He’s also a hard-core gamer with a love for all things pixellated, so he decided to combine both passions together and create this amazingly evocative set of digital artwork.

We found his work to be compelling, so asked Pfaff to choose his favorites and tell us a little about what they meant to him.

Pfaff is thinking about printing and selling his work on posters; if you’d like to encourage him, be sure to visit his artist page on Adobe’s portfolio site, Behance.

Source: Robert Pfaff

One of the first video games I ever finished was 1985’s Kung Fu, a port of a Japanese arcade game (Kung Fu Master)for the original Nintendo system. It was a side-scrolling beat ’em up about a guy fighting through five floors of a goon-filled building to rescue his girlfriend, and even though it’s probably not nearly as good as I remember, it’ll always have a special place in my nostalgia bank because I was so good at it back then.

Fightback is a new free-to-play fighter from developer Ninja Theory (makers of super-shiny console games like the PlayStation 3’s Heavenly Sword and the recent reboot of Devil May Cry), and it’s basically an updated version of Kung Fu. It even has the same 2D gameplay and girlfriend-rescuing premise and graphics and music that call back ridiculous action films from the ’80s.

So needless to say, I like this game a lot.