Here is the assignment “Remixed Game Covers” by Jim Groom: with a DS106 twist!
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Here is the assignment “Remixed Game Covers” by Jim Groom: with a DS106 twist!
This entry is for the DS106 Assignment, “Remixed Game Covers“. For this assignment what I did was to search and download the original image which i will show at the end. Then I used photoshop with the content-aware tool to remove the original title. Then I used the Halo generated font from Font Meme to revise the title. Copy the individual sentences into photoshop, then I lined them up to create one merged layer. Master Chief forever.
This poster remix was done for the DS106 assignment, “Remixed Game Covers“. Its interesting how some of us won’t consider going outside to play most sports, but are willing to indulge in in these simulations year after year. Probably so the closet in fantasy of controlling your favorite teams or players for enjoyment. This image was downloaded via Google search and then I used to Online Image Editor. My name is Jay Jones and I endorse video games.
If there is one videogame I’m certain that I spent a few hundred hours playing, it’s definitely Karateka on the Commodore 64. Karateka a simple fighter game, which like most games of that time was really hard to complete, as there was no option to ‘save’ and pick up where you left off. The game gives quite an extensive narrative introduction, defining the role of your quest, including this text which rolled in the beginning with this music:
High atop a craggy cliff, guarded by an army of fierce warriors, stands the fortress of the evil warlord Akuma. Deep in the darkest dungeon of the castle, Akuma gloats over his lovely captive, the Princess Mariko.
You are one trained in the way of karate: a Karateka. Alone and unarmed, you must defeat Akuma and rescue the beautiful Mariko.
Put fear and self-concern behind you. Focus your will on your objective, accepting death as a possibility. This is the way of the Karateka.
This kind of narrative foundation was fairly unusual at the time of Dig Dug and Donkey Kong, and even more compelling to me was the minimalist aesthetic that went into Karateka.
The bottom half of the animated GIF shows Princess Mariko being locked up by Akuma. The color palette is restricted to black, white, gray, and the tan of Akuma’s costume. Also, the game was effectively ‘letter-boxed’ into a more cinematic wide-screen format.
So this is not exactly an remixed game cover, but it is in the spirit of that particular assignment. I wanted to give homage to the media of the day, the floppy disk, which allowed me to participate in my first bit of software piracy.
It was common to have dozens of boot-leg games copied to 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Back in the 80s you could rent videogames on floppy disk from video stores, and the only piece of copy protection was a little piece of aluminum foil sticker. It was a bit of craftsman’s work to remove and replace it without leaving behind a hint of your deviant copying behavior.
To create this particular animated GIF, I used this lovely scanned copy of the original C64 Karateka floppy. And to make the animation of the characters, I used an emulator of the C64 for Mac OS X called Power64 and then loaded up a Karateka ROM. The whole culture around rebuilding games from scratch and creating emulators is quite remarkable actually – there’s some real amazing geek efforts to preserve game history.
Once I loaded the game, I used Quicktime to do a screen capture of the intro and some game play. These movies were then opened in Photoshop to do work on the frame-by-frame animation in multiple layers. More to describe about that another time.
Two Star Assignment
Process
For this photo I took a game called Pitfalls and I remixed it to change the title of the game. At first I was going to do Halo 2 or a modern game but I figured the older games had a cheesier cover. Cheesier covers allow for a slight change to the cover to make a huge difference in the message of the cover. Once I downloaded this video game cover I had to find a text of an epilepsy so I can copy paste it as a layer in the original picture. I used the eye drop sampler tool to get the color needed to brush over the yellow text of the Epilepsy text. I then used clone stamp to edit the blue background to match the green background of the video game cover.
Motivation
As mentioned before I tried to find a picture of Halo or another modern game to edit. However, it seemed much more fitting to use an older game since those covers are way over the top. Essentially editing an older picture should give more lulz than a newer picture. For this picture I tried to edit the video game title to show the possible negative effects a video game employing such odd color combinations could have on a young child. Possibly creating a seizure through the odd visuals should be a warning to children who wanted to play this game.
Take a video game cover and remix it to change up the meaning or play with the general idea of the game. You can see more examples in this post which is in many ways the inspiration for this assignment.
I’d noticed Jim Groom tweeting various bits of trivia about Atari game systems over the past week or so and thought something must be up. Sure enough, he just created a new assignment called Remixed Game Covers. I got a kick of seeing what he did with the old Atari Bowling game box and the Big Lebowski for his first entry. As someone of an age to have vivid memories of wanting and eventually getting an Atari 2600, this assignment was an invitation to revisit ancient memories. Additionally, it seemed like it would be a pretty simple assignment to do as all it calls for is:
Take a video game cover and remix it to change up the meaning or play with the general idea of the game.
Jim mentioned he’d try to use an animate GIF in his next attempt so I immediately decided to try to beat him to the punch. I scrolled the hundreds of scanned boxes at the Atari Age site until I found M*A*S*H. As this was a program that I watched for many years (at one point it was possible to see five episodes a day in rerun on the various cable channels – and I did) in junior and senior high. Then I jumped over to YouTube and found a clip of “Funny MASH Moments” set to Yakkety Sax.
Once the parts were collected, I used MPEG Stream Clip to grab the five frame sequence of Lt. Col. Blake with baton and Cpl. O’Reilly on drums. I opened the Atari Box image in GIMP and brought in the five frames as layers and begin trying to make the GIF. All I can recall now is that it took more than three hours and I nearly quit more than once.
My intention was to have the animated GIF replace the game graphic on the box while keeping the orange/yellow sticker in the bottom and the read and white diagonal bar in the bottom right. There was a problem because the space was too tall for the GIF. So after I erased all of the graphic, I duplicated the box layer and chopped the top and bottom of either layer and moved them closer together (basically cutting out the middle). Then I had to duplicate the box layer 5 times and merge it down on to each of the five MASH frames. The delay on each frame is 250 milliseconds. I’m not sure if this ideal but it seems to work.
In terms of a story, for me it in trying to imagine how such a game would play. Today was the first time I’d ever even heard of this game. It’s not something I’d have been interested back then even though I was huge MASH fan. I didn’t see the movie until many years later but something about the show worked for me. I suppose it was the general attitude of contempt for authority. My favorite character was Henry Blake which might explain why I selected the clip I did. Thinking about his final episode still chokes me up. Such a tragic and senseless turn of the story line which ultimately, to me, was a powerful anti-war statement. I seem to be drifting into middle-age nostalgia which nobody really wants or needs so I’ll wrap this one up. Just to close by saying that once again I find myself stunned with what I encountered during the several hours of working through this assignment.
I added another new design assignment for ds106 called Remixed Game Covers inspired by this awesome remixing of a series of Atari game covers that Mikhail Gershovich turned me on to a few months back. The assignment is pretty straightforward, take a video game and remix it to change the meaning or idea. I went through the archive of Atari 2600 covers at Atari Age and found the Bowling cover to be pretty trippy, and the first thing it made me think of was Lebowski, so I changed the title to create a The Big Lebowski Atari 2600 game, which is pretty awesome. The only issue I had was locating the right font, and I was trying to find Harry Fat font without paying $60, but I should have known the awesomeness that is Atari Age has all the fonts for all the games and cartridges, and this one is called HammerFat. So, in the end, that made this one a biut easier, but I am thinking you could animate the image, or even add an animated GIF from a film, which is what I plan in playing with later this weekend.
Take a video game cover and remix it to change up the meaning or play with the general idea of the game. You can see more examples in this post which is in many ways the inspiration for this assignment.
