In the beginning Tricky (aka Flam of Thlantesa) created "The World According to America", and saw that it was good. Then Tricky put it on the internet. Then lots of other people must have also seen that it was good, and sent it to all their friends, and put it on their own websites.



This is the original image (except for the recent addition of the URL). It was created in, oh I can't remember, about 1997/8 or so, using my old Amiga 1200 and Deluxe Paint III. Something I knocked up in half an hour on an obsolete computer using even more obsolete software managed to attain widespread fame and recognition on the internet without me even knowing about it. I wish I'd put my URL on it now, because I'd have hits coming out of my ears by now if I had, if you'll excuse the expression. Oh well, so it goes.

In the course of its travels, it has been resized, converted to .png, converted to .jpg and converted back to .gif again. It's even been printed out and scanned back in again:




Some people took it upon themselves to claim it as their own:




Others thought they would make it their own by personalising it:




Some went even further:




I've no idea what the thinking behind this change of colour scheme was:




Someone even thought to give it some personality with a background story:




But, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery:



And so the story of "The World According to America" comes to its exciting conclusion: it was only when I recieved the above image in my e-mail that I thought to use Google to search for my own picture, and was quite surprised to find how widely spread it had managed to become. And now it has finally come home. And now you know who did it.


This one pre-dates mine, but I was not previously aware of it:




(These ones may or may not have been an entirely independent productions, but they're quite funny anyway)







You might also want to check out
THE REST OF THIS SITE
while you are here,

or at least the other "The World According to..." maps