Inspired by the overhead world maps of 1980s RPGs and adventure games, Brett Camper created a Google Maps-style representation of New York City with 8-bit graphics. The map is interactive, allowing you to pan across the city and zoom in to see individual streets.

He wants to create more 8-bit overhead maps for other cities, but to fund that endeavor, he’s looking to raise $3,000 through donation-ware platform Kickstarter. If he can raise..

that much in the next 30 days, he plans to use that money to cover web hosting costs and the initial computing time needed for drawing the maps (purchased using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

Camper already has eight cities he hopes to re-create — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington D.C., Seattle, London, and Paris — and will hold a vote for people to elect seven more cities they’d like to see rendered in this 8-bit style.

If you live in a small town that’s unlikely to even appear in the vote, you could always pledge $200 to the project to reserve an additional city for Camper to create. Depending on the size of your contribution, you can also receive 8-bit NYC postcards, 8-bit NYC postcards, and personal markers on a map.

"I hope that these maps will evoke the same urge for exploration and abstract sense of scale that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers," says Camper. "Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Let’s set out on an 8-bit quest!"(GameSetWatch)