9o9ostudio

visitor@9ostudio:~$./run --intro

We make ASCII art retro games out of Japan.

9ostudio K.K. is a small independent game company building character-grid worlds powered by CLI engine — our in-house engine written in pure C99, running native, on console, and on the web.

explore the engine →about the studio
9ostudio.exe — 80x24

  ___   ___    ___ _____ _   _ ___ ___ ___
 / _ \ / _ \  / __|_   _| | | |   \_ _/ _ \
| (_) | (_) | \__ \ | | | |_| | |) | | (_) |
 \__, |\___/  |___/ |_|  \___/|___/___\___/
   /_/   r e t r o   a s c i i   g a m e s

// 01 — the studio

Constraints are the craft.

We are a Japanese indie game company that finds beauty in limits. Everything we ship is drawn from a grid of characters — no textures, no shaders pretending to be art, just glyphs, timing, and feel.

Working in monochrome and monospace forces clarity. It keeps our teams tiny, our scope honest, and our games fast on anything from a terminal to a browser.

entity
9ostudio (株式会社)
based
Japan
type
Independent game studio
focus
ASCII art / retro games
engine
CLI engine (in-house, C99)
headcount
Small & focused

// 02 — technology

CLI engine — one C99 core, everywhere it counts.

Our in-house engine is written from scratch in portable C99. It treats the character grid as a first-class display, then renders it cleanly across every platform we target.

Native

[native]

Single C99 codebase compiled to fast native binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Console

[console]

Runs straight in the terminal — true text-mode rendering, exactly as retro intended.

Web

[web]

Ships to the browser with WebGL and WebGPU backends for crisp, accelerated glyph grids.

language
Pure C99
render
WebGL · WebGPU · text-mode
platforms
native · console · web
deps
zero — freestanding core

// 03 — team

Two people. Tight loop.

@314isme

Engine Programmer (CLI Engine)

Architect of CLI engine. Owns the C99 core, the WebGL/WebGPU backends, and the cross-platform build pipeline.

@161isme

Content Programmer (assets, chiptune, etc.)

Shapes how the studio sounds and looks — ASCII assets, chiptune scores, and the feel of every glyph on screen.

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