The Shufflepuck Cafe is in the furthest reaches of space, beneath the surface of a distant asteroid. Within its gloom, the denizens of unknown, desolate planets sit, and drink, and play – yes! – shufflepuck. You've wandered into the wrong joint, bub, and they wont let you leave until you beat every one of them at the game.

This painting is a background detail from Elsewalker 24, which I tried to do several times as blotchy, swooshy, low detail brushwork. But I couldn't capture something important about the way the scene felt, and I wasn't willing to crop and skew in a screenshot from the game, so I decided to do it myself. full size, quick and dirty. I think it took more than seven hours in the end.

In terms of the character details, the painting cleaves to how I remember them, rather than being perfectly true to the screenshots of the game. Shufflepuck is a game which, like Troggle Trouble, I remember in far more detail than the game actually had. I didn't actually have Shufflepuck, but a friend of mine with a Mac ST did, along with another intriguing game called The Manhole. I remember being almost as interested in his computer's OS, because it was Mac OS 7, a little older than ours. A lot of the dialogs in his system settings were different!

And in the end, this only took up a few hundred pixels of the finished painting. Which is a ridiculously poor deal for my time. So that's why you're getting to see it now, full size.

, Art