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There was a time when the satisfaction an artist gets from completing a piece of work would have been completely inaccessible to me. Now with the help of a couple of free pieces of image editing software, even an art illiterate nerd such as myself can produce something from almost nothing.

I shouldn't get up on my high horse too soon though. I haven't created something from nothing here, I've merely run pre-existing sprites through modern software. The results produced however are really stunning. 

Of course as with any newfound source of creativity, the rules of the internet have clearly stated that Mario must be the first thing to get the treatment. It happened with Little Big Planet, it's happened with Modnation Racers, and I'm going to do it now. 

Unfortunately, as you can see the sprite resolution in this case really has been too big a challenge for the software. All the detail from Mario's eyes has been lost, and those two white dots (buttons?) on the front of his overalls have been  turned into nipples. Not a great literal transformation then, but funky nevertheless.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Next up was Final Fantasy 6 and the Prince of Persia:

Out of all the sprites I toyed around with, I think this one of Sonic came out the best. All his limbs are nicely spaced out, and his distinctly colored body parts have made the algorithm's job almost easy.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Finally here's Samus and Alucard from Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night respectively.

If you can think of any classics that I've missed please let me know in the comments. If you want to know how I did this then I suggest you do likewise. I'm not going to post a tutorial tonight, because I want to spend the time writing something substantial, otherwise no one benefits. 
 
If anything, this work shows the amazing artistry that went into making sprites back in the day if through some simple processes they can be made to look fantastic twenty years on.
 
Edit: If anyone's interested in seeing what Alucard and Samus look like when animated, then the results are below.