Interview: The Death Generator's Alice Averlong on memes, pixels, and no AI
"I don't do AI slop, I do exact pixels."
There's a good chance you've used The Death Generator. Whether it's for memes, to comment on discourse, or just for fun, you can pick from around 100 games to enter any text you like. Created by Alice Averlong (Bluesky / Patreon / Ko-Fi) - anyone can go to The Death Generator and know that not one bit was created by AI. Which, in 2026, is refreshing.
I've been using Averlong's creation for years now - mostly for group chats in WhatsApp. What I love is how simple it is to pick a game, enter some text, and save it as an image, or, if available, an animated GIF. But with similar sites like Frinkiac championing AI and facing justified backlash, I reached out to Averlong to discuss how Death Generator came to be, why she picked certain games for it, and what else it could feature someday.
Creating the Death Generator
What made you want to create The Death Generator?
Alice: So the earliest version of the death generator idea was some PHP scripts I'd knocked together back in the 2000s to make some simple images. I'd done Bad Dudes (the classic "The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?") generator, and it was basically used for sh*tposting on the old Microsoft 3D Movie Maker forums.
I always liked the idea of easy image generators based on video games, and in 2017, I thought it'd be fun to build another one based on Police Quest 2, a game I played as a kid. It has a great death screen, where the writer of the game (Jim Walls) shows up and admonishes you for screwing up. That turned out to be fun and easy, and so I quickly expanded it to support other games.
How does Death Generator work? Does it recreate assets from the games directly, or something more?
The Death Generator just knows how to stick bitmap font letters together. There's a background image, it places a font on top of it, and there's a way to define "overlays," which are things like the selectable portraits in the MGS generator. It's not that complicated of a composition engine, but it's reasonably customizable.
The generators work by having all their needed assets pre-processed into a format the Death Generator can handle: I extract the fonts, make a clean background template, and add in any needed overlays. So by the time the Death Generator sees it, all generators are some PNGs and JSON metadata. If you look here, you can see the blank background for the MGS generator, followed by the text and portraits. It basically knows how to turn text into the sprites at the top, and then the images below get layered over it as needed.
There are a huge number of games in The Death Generator to use as a meme - what made you pick the ones currently available?
The games are picked for a few reasons:
A. It was important to me as a kid. Some games are just here because I have lots of nostalgia for them (Railroad Tycoon, Gold Rush, and Castle of the Winds are good examples of this).
B. It's something popular that lots of people would know, so it'd get lots of use. This can either be a game that's itself popular (Stardew Valley, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid) or a game that has a memetic dialog box (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Zero Wing (the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" game), Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (the "Press F to pay your respects" game)).
C. It's been asked for. Shadowrun (SNES), Stonekeep, and OutRun are all games people have asked for.
D. I found it looking through game lists and thought it might be a good fit. I'd never played or heard of Pieces (Arcade), Ancients, or All About America until I saw a screenshot and went "Oh, hey, that'd make a decent generator". There are some general rules for what games make it in, though: It needs to have a somewhat distinctive font (Boring fonts don't make good generators, IMO), portraits/avatars are preferred, and if at all possible, an opaque textbox background.
Were some games a challenge to include in Death Generator?
Oh God, yes. I could go on forever about how hard some of these games are, and how hard some of the other ones I'm working on are, such as Bloodborne, Robot Alchemic Drive, and Clash at Demon Head. I usually make a thread on Mastodon (originally, Twitter/X, before Elon happened) alongside each generator, and often they're long and rambling and involve a lot of screaming.
Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, for example, involved partially disassembling the game, hacking a lot of functions out of the running game to make it draw backgrounds differently, and large amounts of literal chaos engineering. I had to figure out how the game encoded which character was supposed to be typing, so I did it by scripting an emulator to run the game's intro and first dialogue scene a few thousand times while corrupting the ROM until I found how to adjust it.
No AI, ever
Unfortunately, some may think that the site is powered by Generative AI. Are there any steps you're taking to ensure every user knows that this was fully created by you?
So far, no steps have been taken. The site is not AI, and I'm a perfectionist, especially when it comes to my pixels. My experience with AI is that it produces, at best, barely acceptable slop. I don't do slop, I do exact pixels. But going forward, I do intend to add something to both the site and the GitHub repo to indicate that no, I don't do AI, and no, this project is not going to use AI going forward.
A few months back, I had a thing with one of the other generators, where I called them AI when it turned out they weren't. They're the only ones I've seen really accused of AI. Up until then, I wasn't worried about it.
Do you have plans for even more games to feature? Perhaps Tomb Raider, MGS 2? Is there even a wishlist?
I'm always collecting games people might want, yes. I don't have a dedicated wishlist because I learned long ago that it doesn't work for me. I've got ADHD, and anything that looks like a TODO list just fades into the background like it's not there. So I generally just make generators based on my own memories of games people have asked for, or someone will suggest one when I'm in a "death-generatory" mood.
Have you seen any images made by users that have really stuck out to you, whether that's as a meme or used for something else completely different?
Oh, there are a lot of them. And a funny thing that'll happen is someone makes a meme with The Death Generator, it goes around Tumblr/X/Reddit/etc a couple times, and then later someone learns about The Death Generator, followed by using it to recreate a meme already from the site.
There's a Super Mario 64 image someone made that I've seen painted, there's a great series of images where someone recreated a famous WWE speech about bad math, and there's a Final Fantasy Tactics meme that goes around Reddit occasionally. Every time, people go, "Wait, did that guy in the game really say that?" and people have to tell them that, no, it's just a fake image. Often, I jump in and go, "Yeah, I made the site for making the images."
A couple of people have used it for music videos - they generate an image for each line of the song and synchronize them.
Other times, some Let's Players playing games will use the death generator for that game to make fake screenshots for thumbnails/promo, which is fun.
I've thought before about making a sort of collection of some kind of them, but I know from experience (I used to moderate a couple of imageboards/forums) that that can turn into a mess quickly, so I've not put it into practice.
My thanks to Alice for taking the time to chat with me.
Plenty of new image generators have been appearing in 2026 so far, but Death Generator was arguably the first to do it well, way back in 2016. In addition, it's stuck to its commitment to using no AI.
Averlong strikes that balance of offering something for free that gets to the point in what you need it for - something that's starting to feel like a rare commodity in today's internet. If you've never tried out Death Generator before, I strongly recommend you do, followed by a donation to her Patreon and Ko-Fi accounts.
