Marshall Astor
Artist Statement

As a child I had the fortune to grow up surrounded by computers, video games and other forms of electronic entertainment. Thanks to my family’s involvement in the computer industry, I was supplied with a steady stream of hardware and software from an extremely early age. I have been interacting with virtual worlds almost as long as I have been living in the real one.

Consequently, I have questions regarding the validity of my virtual experiences, especially how they function in relation to the shared experience of playing games with friends and interacting with others who play the same games. In some way, for good or for bad, my actions in video games must have affected my morals, values and shaped the way I see the world in general.

A deep desire to manifest my personal self into an extremely special and well made game, River City Ransom, is the impetus for the works shown in this exhibition. River City Ransom is an early side-scrolling adventure game with Role Playing overtones, which can be played simultaneously by two players. It is animated in a style known a super-deformed, where characters appear squashed, popular in Japanese Manga and Anime. The game has a rabid cult following to this day and maintains all of it’s playablility despite the passage of 15 years and the sophistication of today's video games.

So I have taken the step of appropriating scenes from the game and inserting myself and other real persons so as to manifest my own narrative in the style of River City Ransom. By editing images one pixel at a time, I have developed a skill for altering, within the constraints of the graphics used in the original game, the characters, text and the placement of objects. I feel that I have inserted myself into the world of River City Ransom seamlessly and in a manner that compliments and gives homage to the original designers of the games that I loved as a child and continue to love today.

Marshall Astor owns and operates Walled City Gallery in San Pedro