Did you know you can just, like, commission an artist to make stuff for you?!
I mean, intellectually I think we all know this, but y'all, you should just try it, it's mind blowing.
I pitched this idea on Cohost a few weeks ago. I was looking for a pixel artist to edit some NES roms.
I wanted to put something together for Veerender Jubbal's birthday...those that know Veerender know that he's a vocal advocate of having characters with turbans in games. People should be able to see themselves as the heroes of the games they play, and if you're a Sikh and you can play a game where you wear a turban, then maybe you aren't just watching someone else's story; maybe you're experiencing your own.
So I asked @crappyblue do some ROM hacks for me, to add turbans to some classic NES games. She did great work! Not only is this an extremely limited canvas to be painting on, she also worked around wild technical problems--like character sprites that are just half the object, mirrored over to complete the image--she also had the wisdom to remember that the Fighter class in Final Fantasy 1 switches over to a different sprite halfway through the game. :)
So I've put all her work up on a website, and I'm calling this project "Turbanization," which is pretty dad-jokey, but I'm embracing my flaws this year.
This project is a small thing, but I love it intensely. Go check it out!
i'm super happy to have been a part of this! it's not every day you get to problem solve for depicting Sikh turbans on characters in 3 colors, limited resolution, and minimal existing graphics. but saying that just highlights why this project is so valuable: i doubt many others have done that problem solving before me, and the ones who did almost certainly weren't doing it in the 80s as part of the many development teams making games for the NES and Famicom. the only turbans i've come across have been of different styles, typically in Arabian Nights settings, and still uncommon enough as to be obscure.
it is a frustrating and dehumanizing thing to never see yourself and your culture reflected in a medium you enjoy, and while we can't go back in time and make things different, we can simulate what that could look like.