Magazine #15.1 1/03
Magazine #15.1 1/03
Obsolete Media Festival
Seattle's Classic Gaming Weekend kicked of Friday night, March 14th with the Opening Night Gala at The Little Theater at 608 19th Ave. E in Seattle. The Little Theater is the home of the North West Film Forum which celebrated the life, death and creative resurrection of obsolete media formats. The evening started with classic games programmer and musician Paul Slocum who performed on an Atari 2600 (running his creation Synthcart) a Commodore C64 and a re-programmed dot-matrix printer. Paul was running and playing all three "instruments" at once and the result has to be seen live to be appreciated. Freaking UNBELIEVABLE! The printer-head had a very saw-wave like sound and together with the roller motor, the built-in beeper and coupled to a microphone and a big amp this was amazing. The audience was just in awe and all the techies could appreciate the technical challenge of reverse-engineering and re-programming a dot-matrix printer as well. After his show Paul also played a song with other "obsolete" that he recorded together with his girlfriend - great!
The other highlight of the evening was Steve Safarik's Space Wars, a projected laser vector game for up to four players and one robot.
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| Rick and Lee in front of The Little Theater | Paul setting up "the band" | Obsolete? | Wes Kim... |
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| ...created this... | ....wonderful retro.... | ....trailer with... | ...music by... |
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| ...Paul Slocum! | Space War | A projected laser vector game by | Steve Safarik |
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| A dot-matrix printer hooked up to big amp... | ....via microphone on the print-head! | The Little Theater... | ...was pretty packed. |
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| Paul explains how it works | And then the show begins... | Playing Synthcart and C64 | Paddle as bender |
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| St. Pong Atari Torture Ensemble | Performance | Yeah, you guessed it: this 400 is being fried! | The head-torturer :) |
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| Lee and Jamie (from The Little Theater) | The Little Theater |
The St. Pong Atari Torture Ensemble rounded out the evening with a live frying demonstration of an Atari 400 to retro-futuristic sounds, basically fiddleing around with some wires inside the cart slot and see what's smoking next. Interesting but a bit too long and I felt really sorry for that perfectly good Atari 400 :) Overall a great beginning to a weekend of classic video gaming fun and obsolete media celebration!
Pictures and texts © 2003 by CyberRoach™ Publishing, no content may be duplicated without the written consent of the author!