In July 1997 a New Zealander named Simon Jansen began to create an animated version of Star Wars Episode IV. As if this wasn't hard enough, he decided to do it using ASCII characters only! He started creating the animation frames using Notepad and he wrote his own Java applet to display it!
The result is amazing. You can see it here.
Thanks to advances in browser technology, a Java applet is no longer required (but it is still on his site if you want to see it).
If you want to find out more, then he has an FAQ page. He even tackles the question which will be uppermost in the mind of anyone who sees the animation: "Why (oh God, why)?"
