#peecol

[andremariano]

[affectdad]

Me & Steve on top of #flattop mountain #hiking #alaska #kidrobot #peecol (Taken with Instagram)

[luckykatt]

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." on Flickr.

rest in peace Neil Armstrong

[luckykatt]

eva on Flickr.

[bearolab]

eBoy's Peecol Gang

eBoy toys in pixel form, circa 2006.

Peecol is another Kidrobot collaboration with the eBoy folks over in Germany. I can't remember when I started noticing eBoy but they're definitely The Godfathers of Pixels. Their discrete isometric style creates a sense of what I like to call "future vintage". The eBoy style reminds me of playing the original SimCity where you could proudly declare your PC at the time as being more graphically powerful than your friend's Nintendo. We live in a world of Retina Displays and 16-hojillion color LCDs but they've chosen to stay put in the land of lo-rez.

Attached at the hip.

That's where Peecol's are actually quite a departure from the type of work the eBoy group is known for. Where's the signature pixel art style? Should I only look at these toys from an isometric angle? :P The truth is they had already produced a pixel styled toy before: Block Bob. It was wooden and quite frankly, didn't capture the densely pixelated intricacy of the eBoy world.

It feels like they abandoned the idea of making an 8-bit toy to focus on making a toy line that highlights the eBoy prolific personality. The first thing is that there are a LOT of characters. I only have five of them and each one is a different shape, meaning they didn't just create one mold for the toy and have ten different color ways like traditional vinyl toys.

The second thing you'll notice is that all of the characters are interchangeable giving you an exponentially increasing number of possible combinations as they release more characters. Presumably, this physical constraint forced the producers to reconsider the material used as Peecols are made from ABS plastic rather than rotocasted vinyl. The feel is more akin to Playmobil toys (remember those?) that achieve that same "future vintage" feel to these toys. I'm certain quality control was a pain with these as blemishes are much more apparent on ABS plastic curved surfaces.

I'd like my pants back...

So just how many Peecol characters are there? See if you can count them all on their official Peecol site. According to Douglas Lassance AKA Asterokid (amazing animator from France), the Peecol images you see on the box and the landing site are renders of 3d models he did when they were initially doing concepts. I would love to see a short film made with those models (I find myself always wishing more were done with digital artifacts of the creation process).

Peecols are just as much fun to remix and combine as the parts on the eBoy blog.

A random DIY Pixorama I made from spare eBoy parts! (above). Try it yourself!

One random activity I like doing when I'm looking for inspiration is to go onto the eBoy blog and paste together random elements from their library of visual assets (apparently they've just created a blog category called Parts) that they post up for internet consumption. I then make my own miniature eBoy world (the cool kids call em Pixoramas) like the one above that I did a long time ago. The tricky part is depth sorting the parts since you're in an isometric view. I like "eBoying" in Omnigraffle but I just can't imagine how many thousands of layers are in one of those actual Pixoramas. How do you keep track of where you are when you introduce a new element? Anyway, I find it relaxing because it's like creating your own isometric game ...and it sure beats farmville. :)

Now how about an eBoy Minecraft mod?