arcade

Tetris (Russian: Тетрис [ˈtɛtrʲɪs]; portmanteau of "tetromino" and "tennis") is a tile-matching puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Soviet Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov.[1] The first playable version was completed on June 6, 1984,[2] while he was working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union in Moscow.[3] He derived its name from combining the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (the falling pieces contain 4 segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.[4][5] The name is also used in-game to refer to the play where four lines are cleared at once.

Tetris was the first game to be exported from the Soviet Union to the United States, where it was published by Spectrum HoloByte for the Commodore 64 and IBM PC. The game is a popular use of tetrominoes, the four-element case of polyominoes, which have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907. (The name for these figures was given by the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953.)

The game, or one of its many variants, is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, Network music players, and as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes.[6] It has inspired Tetris serving dishes,[7] and it has even been played on the sides of various buildings.[8]

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms as well as arcades, it was the successful handheld version for the Game Boy, launched in 1989, that established the game to critics and fans as one of the greatest video games of all time. In January 2010, it was announced that the games in the franchise had sold over 170 million copies—approximately 70 million physical and 100 million paid mobile downloads—making it the second best selling paid-downloaded game of all time behind Minecraft.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Pac-Man[a] is a maze arcade game developed and released by Namco in 1980. The original Japanese title of Puck Man was changed to Pac-Man for international releases as a preventative measure against defacement of the arcade machines.[7] Outside Japan, the game was published by Midway Games as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called power pellets causes the ghosts to turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. It is the first game to run on the Namco Pac-Man arcade board.

The development of the game began in April 1979, directed by Toru Iwatani with a nine-man team. Iwatani wanted to create a game that could appeal to women as well as men, as most video games at the time were war- or sports-themed. Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was, reportedly, the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he also rounded out the Japanese symbol "kuchi", meaning "mouth". The in-game characters were made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger players. The original Japanese title of Puckman was derived from the titular character's hockey-puck shape.

Pac-Man is a widespread critical and commercial success. The game is important and influential, and it is commonly listed as one of the greatest video games of all time. The success of the game led to several sequels, merchandise, and two television series, as well as a hit single by Buckner and Garcia. The Pac-Man video game franchise remains one of the highest-grossing and best-selling game series of all time, generating more than $14 billion in revenue (as of 2016) and $43 million in sales combined. The character of Pac-Man is the mascot and flagship icon of Bandai Namco Entertainment and has the highest brand awareness of any video game character in North America.

(Source: Wikipedia)

"Black Room," is a browser-based, narrative game about falling asleep while on your computer, on the internet. You play as an insomniac on the verge of sleep, moving through shifting states of consciousness. Hallucinatory, pixelated visions of landscapes filled with sprites ripped directly from the arcade/NES/SNES video games of your childhood appear and disappear as you click through fragile internet spaces. Point-n-click mini games are scattered throughout the narrative. Often  interrupted, you continually return to the Black Room, a meditation technique your mother taught you for falling asleep, visualizing black flowers in a black vase on a black table in the center of a black room.

This game, conceived as a feminist dungeon crawler, features a majority women cast of video game sprites from the 1970s-current day.  This work seeks to bring these characters together to form new narratives:  Chun Li reposes elegantly in a desert oasis filled with flamingos;  Catwoman languidly cartwheels across the nighttime beaches of Coney Island; Jennifer Simpson, the lead character from  Clock Tower, runs endlessly through the brightly pixelated fantasy landscapes of the Oregon Trail. These narratives appear as “Strange Visions,” to the player, induced by shifting stages of wakefulness.

(Source: Creators description of work)