Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 69

Looky, looky: We’ve partnered up with Warby Parker for a game and glasses

Warby Parker and Kill Screen have in common a creative (and unconventional) approach to their respective fields of interest. Now we have a project in common, too: an original videogame and a pair of limited-edition glasses!

As of today, August 23rd, Warby Parker’s first-ever—and totally free—videogame is available to play on screens at the Warby Parker website. With the help of Highline Games, Warby Parker and Kill Screen designed a physics-based matching game that perfectly captures our shared love of design and entertainment. Visually, it’s as beautiful as to be expected from us, and the physics-based ballfeel (calm it!) hits the sweet spot of being both simple and fun.

perfectly captures our shared love of design and entertainment

The object of the game is to match and clear groups of like-colored balls in a bowl. The bowl is set on a work desk—ironically, a great place to play—that features made-up books with distracting titles (consider them a challenge!), a pair of good-looking glasses, and the always-important “tilt” button.

The limited-edition glasses, Burke in Glacier Grey (a best-selling frame reimagined in a new hue), are crafted from premium cellulose acetate and equipped with lenses that have anti-scratch and anti-reflective coatings—which, conveniently, reduce the glare from screens. (Score!)

Inside the frame’s temple is an embossed Kill Screen logo in our signature red. Also included in the bundle is a custom lens pouch with artwork featuring the Kill Screen logo cleverly deconstructed into minimalist lines and shapes.

Further, to celebrate our teaming up with Warby Parker, we’re running Vision Week. It’s a collection of articles related to eyeballs and digital media. You can read each article below as they become available:

– Screenage Life: What looking at screens all day is doing to your eyes

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Check out the Warby Parker website to order the limited edition glasses yourself, and to play the browser game (found at the bottom of the page).

The post Looky, looky: We’ve partnered up with Warby Parker for a game and glasses appeared first on Kill Screen.

Kentucky Route Zero’s android musicians are releasing a whole album

To read more from Kentucky Route Zero’s Cardboard Computer, be sure to pick a copy of Kill Screen’s relaunched magazine, Issue 9.

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Junebug, of Kentucky Route Zero’s duo of robotic musicians, is releasing an album. Self-titled and comprised of 11 tracks, the release is an elaboration upon one of the game’s highlights: a late-night performance in a nearly-empty dive bar called the Lower Depths.  

Ben Babbitt, one-third of developer Cardboard Computer and the musician responsible for Kentucky Route Zero’s soundtrack, also provides Junebug’s singing voice and instrumentals. After working to craft her sound for Act III’s Lower Depths performance, Babbitt, buoyed by an enthusiastic response, decided to expand upon what was at that point her only song, the haunting “Too Late to Love You.”  

“I really enjoyed it and thought it would be fun to make more of it,” Babbitt said in a recent call. “There was a whole conceptual framework already there and a palette and an aesthetic and everything. I could just dive in again and make more and see how it developed”.

seamless integrations of humanity and machine

Babbitt didn’t start work on the album immediately after Act III’s release, but the work still grew out of the template established by “Too Late to Love You”—further song sketches in Junebug’s voice eventually leading to Babbitt’s decision to record an entire album. The choice to release a Kentucky Route Zero-adjacent record—not a soundtrack, but a proper album by one of the game’s fictional characters—might be unprecedented, but it doesn’t feel incongruous for Cardboard Computer, who has released a digital art gallery, an in-universe play, and a real-world phone system between Zero’s acts.

“We, collectively, have established this sort of looser way of making things—creating a world—and making many different kinds of things that aren’t necessarily all videogames,” Babbitt said.

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Junebug, that’s the album, is an immediately compelling idea, not just because the prospect of more songs in the vein of “Too Late to Love You” is exciting, but because Junebug is one of the most fascinating characters in Kentucky Route Zero. She rides a motorcycle with fellow android, bandmate, and constant companion Johnny, who is tucked into a sidecar. Half of her head is shaved, the other half covered in a flop of colored hair. When she dances to her music, she sways with otherworldly precision, trading black leather jacket for a high-necked gown. Junebug’s look, like her music, represents a multi-generational sort of cool. She is her own invention—a collection of disparate parts assembled into something new.

“I really, really like how proactive [Junebug and Johnny] seem to be in creating their identities and being very intentional about how they present themselves,” Babbitt said. “They don’t just comply with their assigned identities.” His music is a crucial part of the robots’ depiction, but he often references the work of Cardboard Computer’s other two members (Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy) when discussing the characters. To Babbitt, though, an important element of Junebug and Johnny’s characterization is their refusal to accept “the idea that we become who we become and have no real agency in that process.”

(See this image in full and interact with it right here)

Despite the whirring servo noises that match their movements, and their ability to instantly transform their appearance, it is easy to forget that Junebug and Johnny are robots. They represent a more modern understanding of technology than the utilitarian metal creations popular in 20th-century sci-fi. Junebug and Johnny aren’t tools so much as seamless integrations of humanity and machine.

Junebug’s voice is striking—Jónsi by way of Jimmy Scott—but, like her character, it isn’t robotic, despite the fact that her vocals are the result of a computerized recording process; Babbitt’s natural singing voice modified through software. “Maybe the most obvious answer to the problem of making a robot voice would be to use a vocoder or something,” Babbitt said. “But that’s so uninteresting, and presents a certain position on technology that feels one-dimensional and reactionary.”

Static Between Stations by Junebug

Babbitt remembered being surprised when he first found Junebug’s voice, but said it became increasingly familiar to him as work on the album progressed. “I have a lower singing voice and I’ve always been really moved by voices that, to me, sound very different from my own,” he said. The notion of the transformative potential of technology recurred in conversations with Babbitt. He compared the unique qualities of a natural singing voice to the shape of a face—and likened the process of altering it through software to a makeover.

“It became like vocal drag”

“It became like vocal drag, which is totally fascinating to me,” Babbitt said in an email. With software, Junebug’s voice (and her style of music) was made possible. Recording her voice made “a certain way of singing accessible that was previously inaccessible to [him].” Technology can enable the creation of something new—something both of and outside of ourselves. As Babbitt said, it allows for experimentation with “different ways of being.”

The ability to use technology to alter oneself could apply to Junebug, the android character, as well. Just as she and Johnny change their appearance to suit the moment, she may have changed her voice, too, “to sound the way she wanted to sound.”

Human and machine, fiction and reality, aren’t opposites in Kentucky Route Zero or, really, anywhere else. Tellingly, Babbitt described recording Junebug’s vocals as a process of “internalizing that voice and it feeling less like a kind of cold, artificial, technologically aided process, and more like a strange re-embodying [of] the technology.”

“Or embodying,” he added. “I mean, it was an embodiment in the first place, I guess.”

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Situated around the halfway point of Kentucky Route Zero’s third act—itself the middle of the entire game—Junebug and Johnny’s “Too Late to Love You” performance is an oasis of emotional clarity amid the darkness and confusion that surrounds it. The performance is melancholy, but it’s also unambiguously beautiful. Junebug’s voice, androgynous in its high alto pitch, is ur-human, a universal cry that manifests the pain, want, and hope just beneath the surface of Zero’s characters.  

Junebug is made up of songs that follow suit, layering aching strings and vocals over precise drum machine loops and warm, Angelo Badalementi-esque synthesizer pads. The latter are electronic, but they’re coupled with Junebug’s insistent vocals and the recurring acoustic reference point of lush string sections (multiple violin, viola, and cello tracks arranged by Babbitt and performed by his parents, who are professional musicians). It’s an approach inspired by the minimalism of “Too Late to Love You”—which was “just a synth pad and [the kind of] drum machine you would find inside of an old console organ”—that was expanded only slightly to accommodate a wider range of sounds. Babbitt refers to his work with Elliott and Kemenczy on “Too Late to Love You” (detached from, but inspired by “old heartbreak country songs”) as the primary musical reference point for the album, but also cites ‘80s pop from the likes of Kate Bush, Michael Jackson, Sade, and the Cocteau Twins, as well as the simple, meditative arrangements of Alice Coltrane’s Turiya Sings.

“I definitely wasn’t trying to make a retro, nostalgic thing, even though I totally get that [the album] has a lot to do with a specific, earlier era of music and aesthetics,” Babbitt said. He imagined, instead, Junebug and Johnny recording at a fancy studio, “invited by some out-of-touch producer,” and trying to come up with a number one album from their “totally weird and idiosyncratic viewpoint.” Accordingly, both software and hardware (“I’m not a purist at all in that way,” Babbitt said) were used to create the album. Babbitt, working from Hotel Earth, his friend and collaborator Theo Karon’s studio, said he was “interested in limiting, to a certain extent, the palette of sounds” on the record, intentionally setting himself a constraint and “seeing what could come from that.”  

The result is an album that, like Kentucky Route Zero as a whole, feels both intrinsically of and outside of its time. This makes a lot of sense. The game Junebug stems from constantly blends the past and modern day to tell a story of the pain that affects those caught up in a change that renders their way of life obsolete. The ghosts of miners, the farmers preserved in a museum, the debt-laden bartenders and diner owners—even the struggling musicians Junebug and Johnny—are trying to live through a monumental paradigm shift that seems to have left them behind.

(The 360° video above is only available in the YouTube app for mobile viewers)

In spite of this, these characters find absolution in technologies used just as much to preserve the past as supplant it. They build artificial ecosystems to save a species of cave bats from disease. They create a living simulation inside a computer running on moss and circuitry. They communicate with spirits through the analog waves of television and radio broadcasts. Most importantly, even the poorest and most desperate spend hours sitting in a rundown bar waiting for Junebug to arrive and lift their spirits with a song built on country vocals and an electronic backbeat: The Entertainment. When it comes, Junebug’s song lifts the moldering roof off the Lower Depths to reveal a starry night sky stretching to eternity.

When I say that it would have been easy for Kentucky Route Zero to take, like more cynical artists have, a simpler, more pessimistic approach to technology—to romanticize Kentucky’s rural past while excluding the potential inherent to modern invention—Babbitt’s response is telling: “I think that’s a mistake.” With an opposite opinion, it isn’t likely that the album would exist at all.

There’s no current release window for Junebug’s album . You can preview a track on Bandcamp.

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To read more from Kentucky Route Zero’s Cardboard Computer, be sure to pick a copy of Kill Screen’s relaunched magazine, Issue 9.

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Work this new roguelike out and you can be a time-travelling historian

After wandering around for a few years in the wilderness of The Only Shadow That The Desert Knows, I stumbled into a city. ASCII characters, caves, and poison toads led me to believe that the creator of the game, Jeremiah Reid, had made a fairly traditional roguelike for 7DRL 2016. But when I stepped into Hiast for the first time, I was handed a pile of books—biographies, histories, maps—and a list of lost works.

My favorite part of Dwarf Fortress (2006) has always been generating a world to look through its histories, following heroes and their descendants through wars, or famines, or peacetime. The Only Shadow seems to admire these generated narratives: books on figures list their birth dates and locations, who they married, what monsters they sought to vanquish, and—the detail most relevant to your quest—what, if any, mythical weapons they carried.

you can follow them until they die

The game’s own help page describes it as “a mystery game,” and goes on to say that “If you feel confused, that’s OK! The real challenge of the game is understanding it.” The hints page suggests, “take notes with pen and paper!” If you’ve figured out the next steps in accomplishing your goal of collecting ancient artifacts, you’ll notice that travel across space is rarely safe: your nation is often at war with its neighbors, and even when you’re armed, the wilderness is dangerous and your travel is frequently interrupted by monster engagements.

Traveling through time is a much better option. The Only Shadow lets you use an unrenewable resource called xenotime to travel from year-to-year to hunt down heroes and their weapons. The result is a melancholy feeling where you travel forwards in time to escape monsters, then turn time all the way back to when someone was born to see if you can follow them until they die. I once watched a mother pass a sword down to her son, who I followed until he died. Another time, I tried a similar tactic, but my own nation and that of the city I was in began a war, and I was attacked by an entire city of Orosians at once.

The Only Shadow lets you live out the fantasy of pulling texts from long-lost libraries like the House of Wisdom or the Library at Alexandria, but never gives you time to settle down. You’re always on the run, from monsters, or war, or the creeping instability brought on by time travel. As the elders in the cities say, “[the current month] is fleeting! Put yourself in the books, my friend.”

You can play and download The Only Shadow The Desert Knows over on its website.

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Upcoming game about sea battles is made to resemble oil paintings

The brave elegance of ships at sea has fascinated artists since humans first took to the waves. The “Age of Sail” from the 16th to mid-19th century lifted maritime art to new heights, when sea battles, storms and huge, proud ships made naval painting its own genre. Collections like the National Maritime Museum have hundreds of such paintings, many of which were commissioned by naval officers or by private collectors with an affection for the subject.

A few games have attempted to take to the sea, like the aptly named Age of Sail (1996), Sid Meier’s Pirates! (2004), or the more recent Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), but none have yet looked to the beauty and power present in maritime art for visual inspiration.

Ivan Aivazovsky’s “Stormy sea at night” via Wikimedia

This is where Abandon Ship comes in. British studio Fireblade Software has received a grant from the UK Games Fund—the same people who are funding procedural fairy tale generator Forest of Sleep—to create a naval combat game that looks like an oil painting. They’ve taken cues from Sunless Sea (2015) and FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and aim to combine tactical battles with sea exploration, all while enduring harsh weather and encountering random events on a vast, procedurally generated sea.

If your ship is destroyed, you are able to start anew

In a unique take on permadeath, the game is tied not to your ship, but the character you play as Captain. If your ship is destroyed in battle or in a storm, you are able to start anew—assuming you can haul yourself out of the ocean and into a port. Perhaps you were lucky enough to disembark on a lifeboat before your vessel met a watery grave. Or maybe you’re stranded in the sea, but you see a boat in the distance and they rescue you before you can drown. Random events will take place whether you’re in a lifeboat or stranded, and if you’re able to make it back to dry land, you can build up a crew and take to the water once again.

As long as you’ve got a ship, you can explore. The sea is wild and dangerous, but that’s what makes it so enticing. The grandeur and mystery of a ship finally breaking its way out of a storm was irresistible to J.M.W. Turner and Ivan Aivazovsky, and it’s that same sense of wonder that has led to the creation of Abandon Ship.

You can see the first screenshots of Abandon Ship on their website .

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Screenage life: What looking at screens all day is doing to your eyes

This article is part of Vision Week, our exploration of eyeballs and videogames celebrating our collaboration with Warby Parker. Grab a pair of limited edition Kill Screen glasses here: warbyparker.com/kill-screen

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The eyes are among the most sophisticated organs in your body, comprising an automatic focusing and light sensitivity system far better than the best cameras and film designed to date. Four separate surfaces bend light as it enters the eye, and ciliary muscles flex in order to make these lenses change shape, flattening and thickening to account for distance and light.

In other words, there’s a lot of work taking place when you look at something. So it’s perhaps little wonder that 50 to 90 percent of workers who use computers every day complain of what amounts to intense fatigue, even as the job remains largely sedentary.

A 2013 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that the average 8-to-10-year-old spends about eight hours a day looking at a screen. That number was even higher for older children and teenagers, who spend more than 11 hours a day watching television, looking at a computer screen, or at a tablet or phone.

eyes become sore or produce a burning sensation

A person raised on screen media might adhere to a school routine with periods during the day of lower-than-average screen time. But when they move into the workforce, where they’re likely to have a computer-assisted job, it’s not unreasonable to assume that today’s adults spend more time looking at a screen than they spend doing any one other thing, including sleeping. Estimates vary based on demographics, occupation, and the kind of device-use measured, but this 2015 Nielsen report, which took a broad look at the scope of electronic media use, found that the average American adult spends about 11 hours a day looking at a screen. That number trends even higher for those in blue collar jobs and younger people.

While there are questions of the long-term psychological effects associated with screen time, including “structural and functional changes in brain regions involving emotional processing, executive attention, decision making, and cognitive control,” the most direct manifestation of the staggering amounts of time we spend looking at screens is unhealthy eye function. This is not altogether unpredictable: those who spend a lot of time looking at a screen can find that their eyes become sore or produce a burning sensation. Symptoms can also include chronic headaches and neck and back pain.

X-Ray Specs, illustration by Lou Brooks

As is the wont of the medicalized world, these effects were codified and given a name: “computer vision syndrome.” This unassailably cool name aside (imagine it emblazoned across a vintage t-shirt), the scope of the issue truly does qualify it for status as an epidemic: this 2016 profile in the New York Times found that up to 70 million workers worldwide who spend three or more hours a day in front of a computer experience computer vision syndrome.

It turns out that screen media is uniquely suited to makes your eyes hurt. That NYT profile goes on to explain:

“Unlike words printed on a page that have sharply defined edges, electronic characters, which are made up of pixels, have blurred edges, making it more difficult for eyes to maintain focus. Unconsciously, the eyes repeatedly attempt to rest by shifting their focus to an area behind the screen, and this constant switch between screen and relaxation point creates eyestrain and fatigue.”

In other words, computer vision syndrome won’t be cured by simply switching from the frenetic character animations of Overwatch to the static e-reader version of a novel. It’s the very nature of pixelation that causes the focusing/un-focusing that strains one’s eyes, and not necessarily the content one encounters.

“take a 20-second break to view something 20 feet away”

However, there is some evidence to suggest that the degree to which content requires cognitive focus (rather than ocular focus), be it purely visual or language-based, can also contribute to sore eyes. For example, some studies have found that people who look at screens blink less often, and the more demanding material is on one’s cognitive focus, the fewer blinks one will take, contributing to eye strain.

Finally, there are the detrimental effects of “blue light.” As explained here:

“Blue light is part of the full light spectrum, which means we’re exposed to it by the sun every day. However, nighttime exposure to that light, which is emitted at high levels by smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other LED screens, may be damaging your vision. It also suppresses production of the hormone melatonin, which throws off your body’s natural sleep cues. […] When your melatonin levels and sleep cycle go haywire, your risk goes up for a wide range of ailments, from depression to cancer.”

It’s only appropriate, then, that some of the developers responsible for the ubiquitous presence of screens in our lives are introducing innovations to reduce those screens’ detrimental effects. Apple’s Night Shift, or f.lux, for example, gradually reduce the amount of blue light emitted by electronic devices when the sun goes down, giving everything a pleasant, urine-yellow filter.

All of which is to say that when you combine pixelated images, the cognitive focus required by heavy content, the blue light emitted by our devices, and the sheer amount of time spent experiencing all of the above, it’s no wonder our bodies occasionally revolt.

Eyeball skull implant, via Wikimedia Commons

Thankfully, it doesn’t take much in the way of complicated treatment or time to avoid annoying eye pain. The American Optometric Association recommends that, “To help alleviate digital eye strain, follow the 20-20-20 rule; take a 20-second break to view something 20 feet away every 20 minutes.”

And the changes that repetitive screen time are making to your eyes and brain are not all negative: as this Forbes story explains, the “left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which helps us make complex decisions and stores some memory function” and “The left frontal eye fields, which […] helps us process stimuli and includes hand-eye coordination skills” are improved through repetition. These findings were backed up in a 2014 study at the University of Toronto.

While excessive screen time might cause discomfort in your eyes, so long as some of that screen time is spent playing videogames, our ability to solve problems, remember sequences, and respond to stimuli may very well be enhanced.

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A manga artist is making a bonkers fighting game

With as little hyperbole as possible, Oneachanchan is one of the coolest, craziest fighting games ever seen. Created by manga artist “daromeon,” known for his Kengan Ashua series (2012), Oneachanchan has been in development in one way or another for nine years. “I started drawing the sprites back in 2007 to make a fighting game together with my friends,” daromeon tells me, though explains that project fell dormant for a bit. Three years ago, he decided to pick it back up.

Oneachanchan, daromeon says, is his outlet to freely create things he likes, something he’s not always able to do with the Kengan Ashura series, which is written by Sandrovich Yabako. The game tells the story of an arguing family, with each character representing a family member. The main character, Oneachan, is the eldest sister, the gorilla is the family pet, and the giant green head, Ohjeachan, is the father.  

the gorilla in the game is not Harambe

What makes Oneachanchan standout is its character animations, which are strange, eye-catching, and often out of this world. Daromeon cites influences such as the film and anime series Akira (1982 and 1988, respectively) and the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). He also points to games such as Street Fighter III (1999), and modern artists Terada Katsuya and Aida Makoto. But, perhaps most interestingly, daromeon cites his time restrictions.

Because Oneachanchan is being developed in his spare time, daromeon says, “[character animations are] designed to have the maximum visual impact with the minimal amount of work possible.” For example, Ohjeachan uses tires and propellers to move around rather than “complex movements of legs and arms,” daromeon explains. These animations are copied, and applied to other moves.

There’s a few things daromeon wants people to know about Onechanchan: Firstly, as people have asked, the gorilla in the game is not Harambe—a gorilla recently killed at the Cincinnati zoo after a child fell into his enclosure. “I can’t lack too much common sense [to] be riding on such a sad sad incident,” he says. Secondly, he wants to thank anyone from overseas who has reached out to him with compliments. “I feel my diligent effort [over] the past three years—nine years, if counting from 2007—has been paid off,” he says.

Lastly, and most importantly for daromeon, he sees videogames as a “concrete tool to [facilitate] communication between people with different cultures and languages.” He says he’s proud that he and his game have been a part of that, even if it is only a small one.

There’s currently no release date for Oneachanchan, but daromeon says when the game does come out, it will be completely free. You can currently try out the game, though he doesn’t guarantee this pre-release build will work. To keep up with him, follow daromeon on Twitter.

 

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Harold Halibut’s handmade world is a celebration of vintage animation

Like so many of the best ideas in history, the idea for Harold Halibut came from a dinner table  conversation. Onat Hekimoglu and others were discussing their love of old stop-motion films. Films like Jason and The Argonauts (1963) and The Valley of The Gwangi (1969). Hekimoglu, the lead writer, designer and composer, explained to me that the origins of his upcoming adventure game Harold Halibut are found in those films of the past.

In an era before complex computer graphics, these films used stop-motion photography to create large-scale fights with skeletons, or to wow audiences with massive dinosaurs. Now stop-motion photography is a relic of the past, though, not entirely dead. Last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens actually used the old-school technique to recreate the iconic holochess table from the original film.

Hekimoglu and his German-based studio Slowbros are using this classic technique to create Harold Halibut, which he describes as a “Handmade Video Game.” But what does that actually mean?

“we, too, live surrounded by physical imperfections”

Everything you see in Harold Halibut was created first in our world. Every person, every chair, every kitchen appliance—all of it was created using painted models, sculptures, cloth, and more. After building all those objects and characters, Hekimoglu and his team scan them into the virtual world using a technique called photogrammetry.

“We put every single thing in the game on a turntable.” Hekimoglu explained. “Then we photograph it from every angle to then feed it back into the photogrammetry software which generates a high-poly model out of them.” After lowering the poly count of the models, the team can then use them in real time in the game environment. Using photogrammetry, Hekimoglu and his team are able to create digital replicas that look incredibly similar to their real-life counterparts. This lets the team have models that look like handmade puppets, but have all the benefits of digital 3D models, like real-time lighting and physics.

Using real-world objects also has its advantages, as well as some problems that you wouldn’t normally have to deal with when making videogames. As Hekimoglu pointed out, “there’s no control+Z-ing” mistakes in the real world. If you’re working on a puppet and drop and break it, that’s it. You can’t quickly copy and paste a new one or undo the damage. But some of these mistakes are useful. Uneven table legs or paint smudges aren’t always a bad thing. “[These mistakes] end up bringing familiarity to [Harold Halibut] because, especially on a detailed scale we, too, live surrounded by physical imperfections.”

Harold Halibut is also a love letter to classic adventure games of old. These were the games that Hekimoglu and his team played as kids. But those games also have a reputation for being a bit obtuse and hard to finish. Hekimoglu is hoping that Harold Halibut isn’t as difficult. “The puzzle complexity is set somewhere between classic point-and-click adventures and walking simulators.” He continued: “The conversations and relationships between the characters are a lot more important than using or combining objects.”

As for the story of Harold Halibut, well, Hekimoglu isn’t saying much. He instead wants players to discover it for themselves. But he did describe the basic setup: Harold is a crew member on board a generational spaceship and the ship has crashed on a water planet. “So the setting is basically between a huge, half-intact submarine and the secret landscape outside of it. The crash is already long established once the player enters the scenario and the main task on board is to find a way back into space while dealing with the social enclosure of the ship,” Hekimoglu said. And like so many of those old adventure games, Harold Halibut will be humorous and filled with other characters to speak to.

Harold Halibut will be released sometime in 2018 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out the official site and if you want to know more about the making of the game, you can check out its blog.

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Rez Infinite brings the club kid experience to vinyl later this year

A product of 90s club-kid culture, Rez is getting a fancy re-release for PlayStation 4 and PSVR this fall. If you didn’t know, the 2001 music shooter is a bit of a cult classic, mostly among those who enjoy the rhythm and graphics that permeate its stylized game world. Like a psychoacoustic trip? This is the game for you.

The re-release is not just upping the game to 1080p and 60 FPS (120 for the PSVR version). Rez Infinite will also be released in a collaboration with game and music retailer iam8bit, featuring a one of a kind vinyl soundtrack (complete with attached art and retrospective book), physical disk version, as well as enamel pins and t-shirts (designed by Fez creator Phil Fish).

“just too good to waste”

The retrospective booklet, which is a part of the vinyl done in iam8bit’s traditionally amazing style, showcases both game art and the experiences of the creative team in creating the original and re-release: “What we ended up with was hours and hours of stories about the inspirations behind Rez and its unique development process—stories we all realized were just too good to waste.”

Rez’s producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi said that in part the reason for the re-release was simple: “There’s no easy way to find and play any version of Rez currently—and no way at all on any of the current gaming systems.” Creating a physical disk copy, a growing rarity in gaming today, was a similar no brainer. If the game has become hard to find in the 15 years since its initial release, soundtracks and t-shirts are now also scarce. With the re-release collection, Mizuguchi hopes to give access to Rez to both old and new fans alike.

Pre-orders for everything in the Rez Infinite Official Collection are now live on the iam8bit website. 

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Let Inflorescence City Vol. 2 flower before your eyes

What is a city? It’s a question we rarely consider: that word, city, being such a useful label for the dense, multi-layered, contradictory, opaque, ever-changing, utopic, perverse, magical, and mundane piles of decaying masonry where most of the world’s population spend their lives. A city can be a landscape, or a home, but it can also be an instrument, played by a multitude, a fiction re-enacted daily by its population. Describing a city is a fool’s game, as you can see, with most descriptions simultaneously too big and too small to encompass the idea of a city. But perhaps that is what a city is—an idea, collectively held, prone to transformation.

Loren Schmidt and Katie Rose Pipkin’s procedural project, Inflorescence City tunnels into this concept of a city as a transforming transient idea: something that cannot be looked at directly, lest it disappear from existence entirely.

A constant narration of disjointed text

Built around procedural words and images, generated through carefully sculpted algorithms, Volume 1 of the project presented an endless set of catalogs for imaginary cities, strange publications of articles, interviews, indexes, lost property, and library lists. It feels linked to the literature of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, but also to the procedural text experiments of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low. It created not a city, but a ghost of a city, linked to a body of juxtaposed word and image.

Volume 2 has now joined it, and it resembles a city in perhaps a more conventional way. Like a concrete city it has directions—north, south, east, and west—and what appears to be map. It can be explored, walked, and it can be discovered. But perhaps more importantly it is populated by stories. These stories appear in the same procedurally generated, fragmented language of the first volume, but untethered from the linear structure of their publication, they float free in this nebulous landscape, ready to be connected by the player’s wandering movement.

Over time, backed by a hypnotically shifting soundtrack of harmonic tones, something begins to emerge. A collection of artefacts and parables, some sculptural forms and unclear motifs. A constant narration of disjointed text, running along the bottom of the map, like the ramblings of a lost citizen.

Inflorescence, for what it is worth, means “the process of flowering”, and what flowers here is an open space of potential connections, a place to play a little while and draw your own links between the words and ideas that lie all around you; like the debris of a million half-finished lives. What is flowering here is a city, whatever that might mean.

You can play Inflorescence Volume 2 in your browser with this link.

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The mad science behind Inside’s soundtrack

Without giving anything away, there are definitely some freaky experiments going on in Inside, the latest game from Danish studio Playdead. At times, these experiments are depicted through the game’s eye-popping stagecraft, but in other instances, players take the helm as experimenters, tinkering with switches, valves, and other, squishier, things to puzzle out solutions in a manner that would make Dr. Jekyll proud. Inside’s music composer and sound designer, Martin Stig Andersen, conducted his own unorthodox experiments to create the game’s unsettling soundscape. More interesting than the bizarre nature of Andersen’s experiments, though, is why he conducted them and what results they yielded.

Andersen, who also scored Playdead’s previous game, Limbo (2010), plays with an abstract, muffled sonic palette. The music often sounds like you’re listening to it underwater or, not coincidentally, inside some kind of womb-like sound deadening chamber. “I don’t know what draws me to [these muffled sounds],” Andersen told me, “but I see them as a reference to the feeling of being in a secure place that really isn’t [so safe].” In David Toop’s book, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (2010), he cites scientific studies that claim newborn infants prefer the muffled voices and sounds that they’ve grown used to inside the womb, and that unborn babies feel—as well as hear—sounds, particularly their mother’s voice as it vibrates through her bones. Andersen’s score for Inside plugs into these ideas to push the extrasensory potential of sound design. Low hums rumble and thick pulses undulate, enveloping players in an otherworldly soundscape where music and sound effects are melded into one holistic composition. “The way that I structure and mix the sounds, everything has a musical quality to it. So even with footsteps or whatever material, I regard them as musical.”

Though field recordings and musique concrète certainly have a place in Andersen’s work on Inside, he also took inspiration from cinema. “With Inside it was stuff like John Carpenter films. There was a lot of inspiration in the simplicity [of his scores], and a lot from when he situates the music [within scenes],” Anderson says. “I enjoy these very long action scenes where there is no music at all and then a car randomly drives by and there’s a very distinct music cue inserted in.” Early on in Inside, there’s a confrontation with a pig. The pig initially wakes up and chases you, absent of any background music to amplify the tension. There’s something rawer about the encounter without music, though—just the hideous pig squeals laid over frantic footsteps and hoofbeats. When the pig hits a wall, it triggers a musical stinger that follows you into the next puzzle. The music signifies a relief of tension, but the echoing bass rumble is hardly comforting. Like Carpenter, Andersen sustains mood and tension through sound implementation in addition to composition.

While most music is born out of some synergy of inspiration and experimentation, at times, Andersen’s methods enter the realm of “mad science,” sans the reanimated monsters and plans for global domination. Andersen transfused some of Inside’s audio through a human skull and jawbone, while creating other recordings using a microphone inside a man’s stomach. As bonkers as that sounds, Andersen’s experimental methods are grounded in the pursuit of a sonic aesthetic that sounds unique and fitting in the shadowy, suffocating world of Inside. That these methods correspond conceptually with many of the game’s themes is no coincidence.

experimental methods are grounded in the pursuit of a sonic aesthetic

Andersen was inspired by some experiments at Stanford University that sought to create an audio recording of a human voice that sounds the way it would within the head of the person speaking. “Listening to yourself, half of the sound is the sound that you project into the room and that’s what hits your ear. The second part is internal, coming from your jawbone and ear. In your head, those two kinds of sounds mix,” Andersen explains. The Stanford study sought to measure the difference between your recorded voice and the way your voice sounds in your head when you speak. One means of achieving that was through bone-conducted sound. Basically, the concept is that instead of conducting the sound through the air, you’re conducting it through your bones, as we all do naturally when we hear ourselves speak. The result is akin to what it sounds like to talk with your hands over your ears.

“What I did to achieve that was to get some audio transducers, which are like speakers without membranes, so instead of just putting a membrane into vibration you can attach any object to this transducer,” Andersen continued. “Then I acquired a skull and attached that to the transducer and recorded the sound with contact microphones. You could say it works as a kind of filter.” If you were to put your ear up to the skull during recording, you could have actually heard the sound reverberating within the brain cavity.

“I could run any sound through the skull, but for most part it was this synthesized, musical sound,” Andersen noted, bringing his John Carpenter inspiration back to the forefront. “I had the idea of making this synth score [for Inside], but didn’t really want to hear like actual synth music because that felt too much like a statement.” Undoubtedly there’s a strong sense of time, place, and genre associated with Carpenter’s scores, that would draw strong cultural reference were it used in Inside. “In the end there are still slight nuances of the synth sound, but without actually sounding like it because it’s become something quite different.”

As to the stomach sounds, Andersen brought a professional sword swallower into the studio to put a wired contact microphone down his throat. Once the mic was “in place,” Andersen both recorded the internal body ambience and produced various sounds externally for the mic to pick up from within the performer’s stomach. “Most sounds that we projected into his stomach were extremely muffled, and very distant in a way.” Andersen told me. “But actually in the game I used some of the internal sounds, like the heart beating. [In Inside] there’s this lineup puzzle and there’s this kind of pulse going on, and I used the heartbeat for that.” The lineup segment is a tense setpiece where your every step is being closely monitored by imposing guards, cameras, and dogs. The heartbeat acts as a kind of metronome for keeping the rhythm of the queue while also making players conscious of their own increasing heart rates.

Some of Andersen’s aesthetic choices for Inside may have been achieved through unconventional methods, but he’s also quick to point out the clear difference between placing value on process versus product. “I work through experimentation, but that’s not the point of it. Only in 1 out of 10 experiments does something interesting happen,” Andersen explains. “[Experimentation] is just a means. If, say, the skull sounds good and does something interesting, then I’m using it, but if it doesn’t, then I’m just throwing it away and going onto the next thing. You don’t need any knowledge of the background of my work to appreciate it.” It’s a philosophy that meshes well with a game that also offers very little pretense, right down to its fanfare-less launch mere weeks after the release date was announced.

the product of informed, targeted hypotheses

“With Inside it should be the experience of playing the game, not how it’s done. That doesn’t matter. It’s all about the end product and your experience with it,” Andersen claims. And to the composer’s credit, his Inside score does stand on its own, without the need for liner notes or production tales to prop up its success. However, Andersen’s approach to experimentation is more than some lucky trick that happened to turn out well. His work on Inside is the product of informed, targeted hypotheses that thematically engage with the material substance of the game, and the resulting data is undeniably resonant. While it’s fun to marvel at the sounds inside the skull on Andersen’s desk, far more interesting is what’s going on in the skull that sits on his shoulders.

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