News You Can Bruise for 2008 April 25

I couldn't sleep, and my upgrade to Hardy broke my test suite runner, so you get a weblog entry. Sumana was laughing it up at re-titled Atari cartridge cover art. They're pretty good and they gave me a couple ideas.

There's an art game similar to Telephone where Alice describes a picture, Bob draws a picture from the description, Carol describes Bob's picture, Dale draws a picture from Carol's description, and so on. This page is basically one step in a similar meta-game played with video games. There was a design document for a game called "Casino" which got turned into a 2600 game and a cover art painting. The cover art image was doctored to depict another game called "I Am A Vegas Showgirl". That implies a very different game, which once made would have different cover art. And a game made from that cover art would be Deja Vu or something.

Second, "Salvador Dali's Pinball Thrills" is a great game idea. Short-, medium-, and long-time readers will know that I generally prefer Dada to surrealism, parce que je n'aime pas l'amour. But any pinball table is already a work of surrealist art, so why not do one themed around, say, The Temptation of St. Anthony? And now that we have good-looking software pinball, we could create a pinball board that's a dreamworld of shifting symbols.

I'm also wondering what's with the 1910s theme in several of those Atari cover art paintings. Not a time remembered fondly (or at all) by your typical Atari 2600 purchaser.