Somebody has turned the famous dancing baby GIF into a Quake sprite, and why not?

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Groovy baby, yeah!

1996: the year of both classic FPS Quake and of the famous viral video of a dancing virtual baby, which spawned an equally famous GIF that was emailed across offices around the world. Joshua Skelton, lead artist on first-person rogue-like Delver, has now combined the two, as you can see above.

As he says in the tweet, it's not all about getting the babies into the game: he's creating a tool to convert GIFs into in-game sprites. It's apparently quite simple to pull off. "I just renamed baby.spr to soldier.mdl! The Quake engine treats 2D sprites and 3D meshes (and 3D maps!) generically as models and they can (mostly) be used interchangeably," he says.

Another Twitter user replied with an important question: what if you shoot your grenade launcher at the babies? Thankfully nothing, Skelton says: they just keep on dancing.

My money is on a smiling Robert Redford making it into the game next.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.