Got back from a super intensive weekend of organizing a storytelling VR and 360 hackathon for film and game makers as well as museum personel and historians. Went up a floor to the kick-off meeting for the jam after unloading the car of all the tech shit we brought with us. Had an amazing time with the other participants, drinking cold beer and making puns about bananas.
Participants? Bananas? Well, today was the start of our jam that we (various game makers in the Gothemburg area) are making in collaboration with the local retro game fair. I wanted to challenge us towards constructing game cabinets, adding some variation to the well-known comfort zone of software. You can’t build a arcade cabinette in a few evenings though, so I suggested we should go for cardboard construction. A natural source of cardboard is of course banana boxes, and as the retro game fair is organized at a place called Bananpiren (the banana pier) bananas were a given theme. We’ll work throughout the week with a second, physical gathering on Friday (and Thursday for those who need some extra time for building) and show our results at two tables sponsored by the fair on Saturday.
I have decided on what I want to make, perhaps inspired by the hackathon I just were part of organizing. I’ll do a take on Nintendo’s Virtual Boy! It seems to be such a cool console, both in that it has such a distinct style and in that it is infamously bad. It’s also a well known remnant from the 80/90s VR wave that died off as the Internet rose.
In the coming days I’ll do some brief research on things like its color palette, resolution and typical game style. However, I’m pretty sure that this could be a very doable mobile VR project. I’ll call it Virtual Böj (bent in Swedish), Banana split vision.