Hello everyone,
I've spent the last couple of months tweaking my 8-bit map renderer & downloading new map data, and I'm excited to announce the release of eight new 8-bit cities:

San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Seattle, and Detroit

They're now up (along with New York and Austin) at a new URL: 8bitcity.com

You can see snapshots from some of my favorite spots in these cities at the bottom of this post. I hope you enjoy them! Explore the White House, the Eiffel Tower, the Siegessaule in the Tiergarten in Berlin, Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London, the Amsterdam zoo amongst the canals (also this appropriately Tetris-y patch of land in north-eastern Amsterdam), the tip of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Presidio, the Space Needle and Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, and Grand Circus Park in Detroit.

And several more cities to come soon! Based on the voting results from backers, the original cities I set out to create, and the "purchase a city" rewards, here are the remaining upcoming cities -- some of which are going to be amazing:

U.S.: Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland OR, Oakland CA, Boulder, Oklahoma City

Europe: Rome, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Nijmegen (the Netherlands)

Asia: Kyoto, Shanghai, Singapore

I'll be posting a project update each time a new batch of cities is ready. Look for them in the weeks ahead.

Finally, REWARDS: if you selected a reward, please have no fear, I am indeed working on them! Finding an adequate printer for the posters has proven to be a challenge, but I have ordered proofs of two different variations I'm trying; if they look good, I'll put in the full order (and after that: postcards). If your reward includes adding a map icon of your favorite spot, you will get a request soon, asking you to let me know where you'd like it placed (I wanted to wait until the city list was final, to give people the widest range of choices).

Thanks again for your support,
Brett

Hi everyone --
We're funded! Thanks to all of you, the project ended up at 130% of its goal! I'm excited to get this moving, and I wanted to follow up to let you know about the next steps. There are several things I'm working on in parallel:

-- City voting: as outlined in the project description, 7 of the cities to be mapped will be decided by you. You will be receiving a Kickstarter survey within the next few days, asking for your top 3 city choices. I'll tally these and then post the winning cities here in my next update.

-- Selecting a printer for the posters: I talked to a few printers (both digital and offset) earlier in the project, but if any of you have any personal recommendations or referrals, please send them -- I want these to be as awesome as possible! Because of the nature of the image (pixel art), it needs to reliably print at a very high resolution (probably about 25,000 x 25,000 pixels) with no "dropped" pixels (I can double pixels, but this also ups the DPI).

-- For those of you who will be receiving a postcard and/or poster in the mail, I will be requesting your shipping address via Kickstarter. However, I will wait to do so until I am ready to ship.

-- For those of you who with the "put yourself on the map" (or higher) reward, I will also be requesting the personal map location you would like (again via Kickstarter). However, because the final cities are still being decided, I will wait to send this survey!

-- Finally, to make this expansion possible, I have some further development work to do. I have begun tweaking the map styling rules to achieve the best look for each city (I found that the rules that worked for a very dense city like NYC are not necessarily best suited to all cities). I also need to adapt the application itself to support multiple cities, and to provide a mechanism for switching between them.

-- To my (pleasant) surprise, 10 people selected the "buy a city" reward (!). While 2 of these are "sponsorships" of cities on the original list (San Francisco and Seattle), there are also 8 new cities that I'll be doing, and they're a great mix: Detroit, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Boulder, Singapore, Amsterdam, Nijmegen (Netherlands), and last but not least, Akihabara (Tokyo).

That's all for now. Any questions, please let me know!

--Brett

Rush job for SXSW, only near downtown and only at a few zoom levels, but if you're in town, have fun with it!

http://8bitaustin.com/

To celebrate the start of SXSW, here are a few preliminary screens from 8-bit Austin. I hope you enjoy them!

Hello everyone --
Another huge day -- WE MADE THE GOAL ON DAY 2 OUT OF 30. Thank you!!!

We're already at $3400. But that's no reason to stop after only 2 days! Let's really fill these maps out with backer icons -- surely each of you knows 5-10 people who would like to see their house / favorite spot / whatever on these maps. Not to mention the sure-to-be-awesome posters. Seriously people, the posters.

Incredibly, we now have 9 backers at the $200 sponsor level. We're going international: today's batch adds Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and Akihabara (a fittingly geeky destination) to the city list. And I'm excited to hear from the other backers in this group about which cities they want to see.

Finally, we got more great press today:
TechCrunch, NY Times City Room Blog (second Times mention in 2 days!), Paste Magazine "Awesome of the Day", and something called Internet Watch in Japan that didn't show up until the end of the day but still managed to be the #1 source of traffic.

Oh, and I'm pretty excited we're already over goal because I had to quadruple the servers yesterday to handle the load.

Keep spreading the word! Remember: Michael Arrington likes 8-Bit NYC, so why wouldn't your friends?

--Brett

Hi guys --
Less than 24 hours in, we already have $1,926 of pledges from 33 backers!!

Perhaps even more incredible, we have 4 city sponsorships, for Austin, Detroit, New Orleans, and Seattle! As a Seattle native, that one is dear to me, but I'm particularly excited to see New Orleans, a place that I had secretly hoped I would be able to do. I'm also really looking forward to how Detroit turns out. Jerry Paffendorf sponsored the city and has threatened to integrate it into his prolific Loveland series of micro-real-estate projects. Putting these two projects together seems like a no-brainer.

We also got some awesome press, which led to a little "8-bit downtime" while I frantically re-configured things to deal with the traffic. Mentions in:
Kotaku, Gizmodo (actually, Gizmodo accidentally posted about the project twice today! thanks!), NY Times Bits Blog, Laughing Squid (one of the first sites to use the embedding feature!), Waxy (Kickstarter's own Andy Baio), Kottke, Mike Migurski of Stamen Design, Gothamist, CNET ...and many others.

Thanks to anyone who wrote about the project or passed it along to a friend. Please don't stop! :)

And THANK YOU for backing the project.

--Brett