atari

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)

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)

Super Atari Poetry is a multiplayer game installation that enables players to make about 1000 different poems. The work is made of 3 Atari 2600 consoles, joysticks, self-manufactured cartridges, and old TVs. Each cartridge contains a group of verses that are constantly changing colors which can be manipulated using a joystick. In this way, the audience can either freeze/move the colors or just move forward and backward the sentences. The reading of the 3 verses printed on the screens produces an interactive and coherent poem that's always changing its meaning and chromatic structure.

Super Atari Poetry follows a non-lineal narrative system present in previous works such as The Poetic Clock, 1997; The Poetic Machine, 1998 and Poetic Dialogues, 2000-05. It is also attached to an exploration based in Atari 2600 consoles initiated by the artist in 1985. It has precedents in works like net@ari, 1985; the Atari Poetry series, 2000-2005; and Justicia, 2003.

(Source: http://www.cibernetic.com/indexart.html)