Remember playing video games as a kid and getting so immersed in the experience that the low-res 8-bit graphics actually seemed real? Artist Aled Lewis fondly recalls those childhood memories and decided to show the rest of the world how a gamer sees things. He takes classic video game characters and superimposes them on real-life backgrounds in his series Video Games Vs. Real Life.

Although everyone’s favorite plumber is conspicuously absent from the images, Aled does represent those awesome but often-forgotten classics like Lemmings and SkiFree. The more mainstream games like Donkey Kong, Mario Kart and Sonic the Hedgehog also make an appearance.

With the incredibly lifelike game graphics we have these days, it’s almost hard to imagine how we got so drawn into the crude worlds in these early games. Maybe our imaginations were better back then, or maybe we were so enamored of the games themselves that we didn’t care how low-quality the graphics were.