Hasta La Ideas

Illustrator Christine Berrie gives the classic game the Audubon treatment

London’s Magma Books gives new meaning to bird calling with a handsomely illustrated bingo set featuring 64 of the world’s most exotic feathered friends. Tapping RCA grad Christine Berrie to bring Bird Bingo to life, Magma’s take on the classic game is as easy on the eyes as it…

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Professional-weight, hand-painted bones made in collaboration with GoodWoodNYC

Representing a community of photographers, writers and other creatives, NYC-based boutique creative agency TheGoodLife! curates content, events and campaigns for both established and fledgling companies. As part of their constant quest to bring this “Family” together, principals Craig Wetherby and Tim Brodhagen looked to one of their favorite pastimes,…

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Une très belle campagne réalisé pour les prochains Jeux Paralympiques (prévu pour fin août) par la chaîne anglaise Channel 4, mettant en avant ces catégories et profil d’athlètes exceptionnels. Un spot intitulé « Meet The Superhuman » sur une bande son de Public Enemy – Harder Than You Think.

Fly a spaceship and melt your mind with Rob Lach’s experimental video game

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to shoot down bomber planes, race a Ferrari in a Volvo or fly a space ship while on acid, POP might offer the insight you need. The mind-bending experimental video game consists of what it calls “a series of erratic minigames” set to a steady stream of panic-inducing music. Designed by independent developer Rob Lach as an exploration in conventional game development, the purposefully disjointed experience was designed by creating the music first then running with the first game concept that came to mind. The lo-fi result feels at once nostalgic and unsettling.

Using various controls—mouse clicks, arrows keys, Z and X buttons—the player navigates through seven “interactive vignettes” of hand-drawn pixel art, often with little to no instructions. This purposeful lack of declared objectives leaves all understanding and interpretation up to the individual, a task only made more fun by intense tunes and floods of strobing colors. As a result “Launch” ends up looking like a reenactment of the Challenger disaster, while the more manageable “Air Raid”—curiously reminiscent of one of the more memorable Full Metal Jacket scenes—only became clear after multiple inflictions of keyboard abuse.

In “Highway” the player races a red Volvo wagon down a never-ending road in some nameless city. Coaxed on by a pounding beat, the faux chase scene feels like a lo-fi Cruising USA with a cheeky sense of juvenile design. Subsequently in “Gunner” the operator shoots down bombers with the click of a mouse as equally suspenseful beats play in the background. To add to the perfectly retro aesthetic, each “minigame” is flanked by pixelated snapshots and distorted movie clips from a bygone era.

Lach’s POP game is available through a pay-what-you-want (minimum $1) platform. For a better idea of what you’ll be getting yourself into check the teaser video or head directly over to POP online.

Moscow’s interactive museum dedicated to video game nostalgia of the late regime

Six years ago two young friends from Moscow were reminiscing about a favorite stand-up arcade game from their youth in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Few are aware of the fact that while the Soviet Union was in its final days, its military factories were churning out arcade games with names like Морской Бой
“Sea Battle” and снайпер “Sniper” that were strikingly similar to the ones enjoyed by their ideological enemies in the United States.

The group of friends found a broken-down Sea Battle game in a shuttered arcade park and were able to buy the machine for the cost of moving it. Fast forward to 2012 and these friends now operate the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow, where about 40 games click, whirr, whistle, flash and beep to the delight of visitors from around the world.

Few of the machines are video games with computer microprocessors—instead they rely on servos, wheels, levers and all manners of moving parts that were all cutting-edge technology when released in the ’70s, up until 1991 in the final days of the Soviet Union.

“Sea Battle was made at a factory that made real rocket guidance systems for the Soviet Navy,” says 29-year-old Alexandr Stakhanov, museum director and one of the founders. “Military factories had a lot of free personnel and resources and they had to find ways to maintain levels of production.”

Sea Battle can be played online, but others like the slightly less sporting Танкодром “Tank Training”—in which players drive a real plastic tank around a field blasting an array of parked military vehicles—and Воздушный Бой “Aerial Combat” are likely only available to operate at the museum.

The museum’s beginnings were modest—Moscow State Technical University, where Stakhanov studied economics, donated the use of a disused bomb shelter. There, Stakhanov and his team pieced the units together, often cannibalizing three or four machines into one working specimen. Stakhanov doesn’t hold onto any nostalgia for those early days. “It was a terrible place, broken down—there were no windows,” he says.

For the past six months the museum has found a home in an airy, 3,660-square-foot former industrial building in a quiet neighborhood in eastern Moscow. Natural light pours in and restored vending machines sell artificially colored tarragon and pear flavored sodas.

Visitors are given a cup of Soviet-minted 15 kopek pieces and set loose to explore and play the various games, whether shooting down N.A.T.O. jets or playing goalie for the Soviet hockey team, it’s the standard adolescent male fantasy world—and a treat for pop culture and history buffs—delivered at the drop of a coin.

The team is constantly traveling across Russia looking for potential museum additions or spare parts to keep the games functioning, and their blog (translated from Russian) offers ongoing updates on new and improved games.

The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines is located at Baumanskaya St., 11, Moscow, Russia.