Ode to joysticks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/12/2010 (5445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FOR a couple of generations, before the ubiquity of home console systems helped shut most of ’em down, the neighbourhood arcade supplied the necessary soundtrack of teenage life.

It was a symphony of blee-bloo-bleeps and jangle-jangle change, of manic buttonmashing and the occasional frustrated wail.

And now, without even searching for quarters, you can live it all over again — all while shining a light on the city’s young and furiously creative video-game-making scene.

Meet the Winnitron 1000. Cobbled together by seven techy Winnipeggers and installed, at least for the time being, at downtown’s laid-back Lo Pub, the machine makes the lure of video games pull you closer to home: there are 12 separate games to play on the Winnitron, and many of them are made in Manitoba.

Now, the free-to-play arcade game is getting buzz from Toronto to Seattle, Brazil to Sweden. Not that the Winnitron’s makers did it to get famous.

“There’s a few different (reasons) as to why would you make this thing,” says Alec Holowka, 27, who spearheaded the project. “Number 1, it’s awesome.” Do you even need a number 2?

“It’s a really neat way to make the local indie game scene stand out,” says Holowka, whose own indie game studio, Infinite Ammo, earned international attention in late 2007 with the release of a lush and later award-winning game called Aquaria.

Like an awful lot of killer ideas in the digital, do-it-yourself age, the Winnitron was born from a quip, tossed off between friends on the way to somewhere else. Long inspired by a project out of Toronto called, you guessed it, the Torontron, game designer Marlon Wiebe finally raised the idea of doing it right here.

“It seems crazy,” says Wiebe, 28. “I had this idea for a long time, and I didn’t mention it. That’s what happens when you’re with these guys… ideas will happen.”

And when they happen, they happen fast. It was August when Wiebe “blurted out” the idea; by October, the group of would-be arcademasters was crawling through a jam-packed William Avenue warehouse, scoping out the aging remains of vintage arcade games.

The winner: an old arcade cabinet that once housed an old shoot’em-up called Total Carnage, first released in 1991. The thing didn’t work anymore, but after slapping $50 of paint and some new controls on the box, the Winnitron had its home. Inside the cabinet: an old, cheap computer, running software written by the team. Through that software run 12 games, which can be updated online via the computer’s Wi-Fi connection; at least five more are being tweaked as you read this. In all, the whole shebang cost about $600; not bad for what could be the most innovative marketing strategy to hit this city in a long time.

Some of the featured buttontwitchers are indie-game blockbusters, including an exclusive two-player version of the iPhone hit Canabalt, designed by a Texan friend of Holowka’s. Mixed in are fresh local upstarts, such as a zippy little game called Leap4Blue designed by Winnipegger Noel Berry who, at 17, is the youngest of the five local designers currently featured on the Winnitron.

But will people play their games?

The early answer, thanks to statistical data collected from the machine, is in the affirmative. After circulating around the indie game and new media scenes for a few weeks, the Winnitron made its public debut at a Lo Pub party called DataDance on Dec. 4. The event launched at 8 p.m. and closed at 2 p.m. During that six-hour span, the Winnitron was being played for five hours and 56 minutes.

Constant playing? Not bad for a first try. “There were always people there,” recalls Kert Gartner, the Winnitron team’s “film, graphical and new media man.” The two-player games were the most popular, as folks crowded around the machine to mash away on buttons.

But even those who never got to try the Winnitron were talking about it. Days before the machine’s public debut, Gartner threw together a video trailer for the two-player Canabalt; the video, which Holowka dubs “kind of the best thing ever,” shows the game’s cutely pixellated hero dashing across downtown Winnipeg rooftops.

Within the day, international video-game blog Kotaku — consistently ranked one of the Top 40 tech blogs in the world — posted the video and tipped its hat to the Winnitron. And from there, the news went to a zillion other hot-shot game blogs and the buzz just sort of exploded.

Winnitron’s wizards were shocked. “It was a really neat project to bring together a bunch of people,” Holowka says. “But we were not expecting it to be that big. We were expecting it to be a cool thing for Winnipeg, maybe make the local news.”

Instead, it made international waves. From Seattle, the Netherlands and Calgary came emails from indie-game designers wanting to do their own version. It turns out the Winnitron’s already its own brand. “We figured if people had it in Calgary, they’d want to call it the Calgatron,” Gartner says, puzzled. “But they don’t. They want to call it the Winnitron.”

Whatever you call it, the Winnitron team is giving away the software they wrote for free — the system was never designed to be a money-making affair, Holowka says — and providing support.

Still, some of the inquiries are surprising. Japanese Winnitron fans moaned that they wished they were in Winnipeg, a suggestion Holowka laughs off.

“What? No you don’t! Especially not now (in December)!” he says with a laugh.

“(And) some people want us to fly it to Brazil for a conference. I don’t even know how that would work.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca