Miles Buckle Creates Imaginary Retro Video Games on Instagram

Artist and animator Miles Buckle uses his Instagram feed to showcase entirely imaginary retro-style video games. These short clips reimagine cinematic classics by directors such as David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Stanley Kubrick through the visual language of older video game engines and platforms.

Examples of Buckle's work include recreating scenes from The Shining using the style of The Sims 2, and adapting the opening sequence of Twin Peaks through the perspective of SimCity 2000. He also created a low-poly animation of Peter Finch delivering a monologue from the film Network. These projects exist exclusively as short clips on social media.

Buckle's path toward 3D art began in childhood with Lego, Minecraft, and Blender, driven by a desire to create digital objects without limits. He later studied graphic communication design at Central St. Martin's in London. For his final degree show project, he presented an interactive narrative game called Nights Bridge inside a modified personal computer from the 1990s, replacing internal components with modern hardware.

Nights Bridge explored the nature of memory and graphic fidelity. The project featured shifting visual representations based on how far back a memory went, transitioning from a hyper-realistic present to PlayStation 1 graphics and eventually to a Mario-style side-scroller. The game is not publicly playable due to export issues in Unreal and the inclusion of various copyrighted elements.

Buckle's recent Instagram output focuses on videos inspired by the 2005 Mattel toy Pixel Chix. While followers often express a desire to play these imaginary adaptations, Buckle notes that many of the films he draws inspiration from will likely never receive official video game adaptations due to copyright and licensing constraints.