8-Bit Theater - WikiHQ

8-Bit Theater is a sprite comic, meaning the art is mainly taken from pre-existing video game assets, created by Brian Clevinger. It was originally published from 2001 to 2010 and consists of 1,225 pages. The webcomic was, at times, one of the most popular webcomics, and the most popular sprite comic.

The comic initially follows and parodies the plot of the first Final Fantasy game, following the "Warriors of Light" who are supposedly on a quest to find four elemental orbs to help them defeat Chaos. Instead, the characters mainly serve their own selfish interests, causing destruction in their wake.

The success of 8-Bit Theater contributed to the popularity in creating sprite comics, with one list recording over 1,200 sprite comics as of 2004. It was one of the first sprite comics, a comic made by using pre-existing video game graphics. In one interview, Brian Clevinger said that he had had the idea of doing a sprite comic but had not acted on it until someone sent him a link to the sprite comic Bob and George which inspired him to try it himself. Clevinger also said that he lacked drawing skills, which made a sprite comic attractive. Clevinger used the comics as part of a college assignment, saying that "8-Bit Theater began as an excuse to essentially do nothing and get college credit for it".

8-Bit Theater uses sprites from the first Final Fantasy game for the NES, The comic sometimes used 16-bit or 32-bit sprites to depict more powerful creatures. While most speech bubbles are white with black text, colored bubbles or text are sometimes used to give an impression of the voice.

In a 2009 interview, Clevinger said that he typically spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings writing the comic, then spent the afternoons and evening putting the comic together. He used Adobe Photoshop to create the comic.

8-Bit Theater ended in 2010.

The group are ostensibly on a quest to find four elemental orbs to help them defeat Chaos, but the characters have no interest in the quest and mostly focus on furthering their own selfish goals.

Clevinger described 8-Bit Theater in an interview as "a comic about the four people most ill-equipped to save the world who, through chicanery and brute ignorance, are the very people tasked with doing so. It's mostly a parody of fantasy and video game tropes, but a wide range of subjects are touched upon".

The comic points out and dissects many of the tropes used in role-playing video games, especially those from Japan. A significant portion of the humor results from creating reader anticipation for dramatic moments which fail to come; Clevinger said that "[his] favorite comics are the ones where the joke is on the reader". According to a reviewer, 8-Bit Theater "developed one of the most meta-textual, self-referential, self-deprecating encyclopedia of esoteric in-jokes".

Black Mage (full name Black Mage Evilwizardington He attracts bad luck which causes innocent bystanders to be harmed.
Fighter (full name Fighter McWarrior): a constantly stupid character.
Black Belt — a talented martial artist and travelling companion of White Mage. Black Belt had an extremely poor sense of direction, to the effect that the laws of physics and spacetime tended to rearrange themselves around him. He was killed by the Fiend Kary in the course of the series.
Sarda the Sage — an omnipotent wizard who forces the Light Warriors to retrieve the four elemental orbs. He claims to be "The Wizard Who Did It" and uses his powers in an immensely irresponsible and careless manner.
The Dark Warriors — the evil counterparts to the Light Warriors. A group of villains based on minor enemies from the game. They consist of Garland, Bikke the Pirate, Drizz'l the Dark Elf Prince, and Vilbert Von Vampire. They plot the downfall of the Light Warriors, but are depicted as even more inept than the Light Warriors themselves.
The Four Fiends — powerful elemental beings that guard their respective elemental orbs. They are Lich, Kary, Ur, and Muffin. They were individually killed by the Light Warriors, and then, following their resurrection as a group, killed by Black Mage.

Plot

8-Bit Theater opens with an introductory sequence that explains how the Light Warriors initially meet and decide to form an adventuring party in the kingdom of Corneria, where King Steve's daughter, Princess Sara, is being held captive by the knight Garland in the nearby Temple of Fiends. After her rescue, during which both the Light Warriors and Garland himself are shown as so incompetent that Sara has to orchestrate her kidnapping and rescue herself, the king has a bridge built that connects Corneria to the main continent.

Here the Light Warriors meet the witch Matoya, who blackmails them into recovering her stolen crystal. In the port town of Pravoka the party defeats the pirate Bikke (accompanied by Garland) and uses his ship to travel on to Elfland. There, they discover the King has been poisoned, apparently by the same person who stole Matoya's crystal, and Thief is the prince of Elfland. The Light Warriors retrieve the antidote and Matoya's crystal from the dark elf Drizz'l, who is shortly thereafter recruited by Garland and Bikke. Upon his recovery, the Elf King sends the Light Warriors to save Elfland by retrieving the Earth Orb from two undead beings, Vilbert von Vampire and his father Lich, the Fiend of Earth. Vilbert survives the battle and is later recruited into Garland's Dark Warriors, while Lich goes to hell. White Mage then sends the Light Warriors to meet Sarda the Sage, an omnipotent wizard who takes the Earth orb and proceeds to draft the group into quests for the other three elemental orbs.

The Fire Orb is held by Kary, the Fiend of Fire in Gurgu Volcano, before the group can defeat her and retrieve the orb. A subsequent side quest to the Ice Cave on Sarda's behalf, during which the Light Warriors encounter squid-like Doom Cultists, is ultimately fruitless. A second side quest, however, involves the Light Warriors meeting the dragon god-king Bahamut, who sends them to the Castle of Ordeals to obtain a rat tail. There, the Light Warriors each face their own internal demons: Sloth (Fighter), Pride (Red Mage), Greed (Thief) and a doppelgänger of Black Mage, who is the only thing that can represent his evil. The Light Warriors present the rat tail to Bahamut, only to find that it is an ingredient in a virility soup his girlfriend Matoya makes for him. The party is rewarded with class upgrades: Red Mage becomes a Mime, Fighter becomes a Knight, Thief becomes a Ninja,

Returning to the task of retrieving the elemental orbs, the Light Warriors travel to the cities of Gaia and Onrac and use a submarine provided by Sarda to reach the Sea Shrine, where they meet the Doom Cultists a second time. After defeating them, they accidentally summon the third Fiend, Ur (known in the game as Kraken). The Light Warriors kill Ur, retrieve the Water Orb and travel on to Lefein in search of the Air Orb, where they meet Dragoon, the last Dragon Knight, and the evil dragon Muffin, the fourth Fiend, who guards the Orb of Air. During a battle in Muffin's Sky Castle she is killed by Dragoon. The Sky Castle itself explodes after Fighter and Black Mage take the Air Orb.

Upon presenting the final orb to Sarda, he dismissively orders the Light Warriors to return to the Temple of Fiends, where they find that the Dark Warriors have made the temple their base of operations. During the night, Drizz'l summons the Four Fiends from Hell and has them confront the Light Warriors. Black Mage, using evil energy he absorbed from his doppelgänger, kills the fiends, absorbs their evil energies as well and turns on the other Light Warriors. Sarda interrupts the fight and reveals his intent to destroy the Light Warriors himself.

Sarda explains himself to be the grown-up version of a child that suffered great harm as a result of the Light Warrior's actions around the world. Young Sarda became so focused on revenge that he studied to be a great wizard and travelled back in time to the beginning of the universe to remake it without the Light Warriors; after discovering that changing the past was impossible even for him, he decides to settle for making the Light Warriors into the warriors of legend, for no other reason than to further humiliate them in defeat. Sarda absorbs the orbs' magic energy as well as Black Mage's evil energy and easily unmakes not only the Light Warriors' class changes, but also removes their original abilities. Sarda's power quickly becomes erratic and unstable, and Chaos, the King of Demons, takes the opportunity to possess Sarda's body and announce his plans to annihilate the universe.

However, before a final battle between the Light Warriors and Chaos can begin, he is destroyed off-panel by a group of four White Mages, a party combination that was dismissed in one of the earliest episodes as ineffectual for the game, and all credit for saving the world goes to a group of bystanders, the Dark Warriors. The Epilogue picks up three years later. White Mage visits Red Mage and Dragoon at a restaurant, where they have started up an extremely unsuccessful support group for sole survivors of ancient sects. Afterward, White Mage visits King Thief in Elfland, who has been trying to locate Black Mage and Fighter, in an effort to obtain more riches from their adventure. Black Mage and Fighter find themselves poor and out of work in a remote town, trying to make money by taking job postings in the town square. The epilogue ends with Fighter suggesting that they resume their search for the "Armor of Invincibility" that Fighter has been searching for since the beginning of the comic.

Reception

Readership figures

Around 2003/04, 8-Bit Theater was the most popular sprite comic on the web In 2009, Multiverse Comics described it as "massively successful" and "one of the bigger smash hits of the web-comic world". It was also nominated for a WCCA award in 2003.

Financial success

In 2002, Clevinger was supporting himself financially from the comic through T-shirt sales, advertisements, and a "donation" service by which readers could voluntarily send him money. Clevinger offered rewards for donating such as wallpapers. However, no other sprite comic reached the popularity of 8-Bit Theater. An expansion pack for the board game Bargain Quest was released in 2019, based on characters and items from 8-Bit Theater.

In 2021, Clevinger launched a Kickstarter for the 8-Bit Theater 20th Anniversary Complete Script Book which collected every strip. The book was script-only due to copyright issues and the low 72 dpi resolution of the sprite comics, which is well below the threshold for quality printing. It reached its initial goal on April 21. It was released exclusively on the CRWN Studios website.

References

Story notes

External links

Complete archive of 8-Bit Theater on the Internet Archive