This isn’t the first time Metroid characters have been brought to life in costumes, but they stay so true to the game’s appearance that for a split second, looking at the photos, you’ll think that they’re fake.

Originally released in 1986, the Nintendo game is a 2D side-scroller, and animator Daniel Cattell’s costumes look as though they’ve jumped right out of a Gameboy screen.

Cattell, a 23 year-old animation student at Rutgers-Camden University in New Jersey, created the life-size 16-bit costumes and in an interview with Nintendo Power, he explains why:

“I wanted to create an effective costume that stood out from others that I had seen and to do it with almost no budget, relying entirely on my creative abilities to make up for it. As an animator (and pretty skinny guy), I finally realized that I could make these costumes based on cardboard recreations of the 2D animated sprites of a game.”

To see all the costume photos, check out Cattell’s Deviant Art profile.

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