Combat at the Movies Press Kit

Sure, great works of cinema are great! But aren’t they missing something?! Yes! They’re missing tanks! Move over Orson Welles! Move over Robert DiNiro! These tanks are ready for their close-up!

Play Combat at the Movies (HTML5, desktop browsers only)

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 2 December 2020
Platform: Browser (desktop)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/combat-at-the-movies
Price: $0.00

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Combat at the Movies features a selection of 10 films from Sight & Sound magazine’s Critics’ top 100, each adapted into the visuals, sounds, and interactions of Atari’s classic tank-fighting game Combat. The featured films are Citizen Kane (1941), Rashomon (1950), Tokyo Story (1953), L’Avventura (1960), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and Beau Travail (1999). In each case, a scene from the movie has been adapted, experimenting with the question of how (and whether) one can convey some of the same ideas and emotions as a film in the highly limited frame of an Atari 2600-era videogame.

History

I originally conceived of Combat at the Movies as being a more straightforward sequel to my games PONGS and BREAKSOUT, that is a series of variations on the classic game Combat from Atari. The idea of working on film adaptation as a specific subset of possible variations came thanks to a call for papers for a special issue of the arts journal on adaptation in relation to videogames. I thought Combat might be an interesting platform to explore this idea of film adaptation in my own way, and so undertook to select fairly well-known “classic movies” to adapt.

The process took an extra long time due to a number of life events and of course the global COVID-19 pandemic. As such, I started all the way back in May 2020, and only really wrapped up the game itself at the end of November 2020. Along with the game and the accompanying documentation, I did indeed write an article for arts exploring the design and development process, which you can find here: Film Adaptation as Experimental Game Design.

Combat at the Movies is also another data-point in the ultra-detailed process documentation approach called Method for Design Materialization (MDM). So, if you want to, you can read a lot about the game’s development by reading its process documentation and by going through its commit history.

Technology

Combat at the Movies was created in JavaScript using the excellent Phaser 3 game framework. Tilemaps were created in Tiled. Sprite atlas was created in TexturePacker. Sounds were manipulated in Audacity.