There was a brief period after the precipitous crash of BBS popularity where exposure to ANSI art was mostly through warez intros and crackscene tools.

Anyone who was a teen in the 90s is more likely to reminisce about the warez scene than the BBS scene, which was popular when they were rather young kids.

I think it's also a lot more interesting that cracking teams usually had an artist.

ANSI artists and MOD trackers! Such an incredible wealth of cultural artifacts from that scene.

I think it has more to do with the type of audiences. I was lucky enough to have access to my dad's Atari 8-bit computer, as well as a 286, both that allowed me to connect to BBS systems. I was exposed to the ASCII/ANSI art early on. Most of my friends did not have PCs until the late 90's or early 2000's. Their experience with the art was through .NFO files in warez. I imagine how old you are, and when your first experience with computing, dictates your connection to the art scene.

True. But having seen both I think the ones who were the best at it tended to team up with the warez distributors.

Yeah, I remember a lot of shareware games I used to play would show a big ANSI art thing to promote their BBS and how to buy the game.

I googled and found a lot of ZZT screenshots as well, not really the same but it could be used to create ANSI art.