A lot is going on in browsers these days. They are becoming increasingly powerful and resource-demanding.

So it just feels natural to combine high resource usage infrastructure with low resource using graphics to get the worst of both worlds.

Not quite, but you get the idea.

There’s a guy on the internet (haha) who dedicates time to write ASCII / character based graphics engines and games with it.

Meet MrGumix:

Of course, what’s that games and graphics?

Exhibit #1:

And the more advanced Exhibit #2: