Messhof goes PVP with Raging Hadron

May 4, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

Last Wednesday night, You Found the Grappling Hook! author Mark Essen unleashed the trailer for his upcoming No Quarter exhibition piece, Raging Hadron. Described as “a two player competitive game… that combines swashbuckling swordplay with 8-bit psychedelia”, the game comes off a bit like Jordan Mechner on an angry acid trip. Or to phrase it a little differently, Versus Prince of Karateka in Fractal Land.

NYU’s No Quarter exhibit will be held this Thursday, May 6th. It serves to demonstrate four games “that explore the possibilities for social play in real-world environments, to imagine a new arcade that generates complex, surprising, and playful interactions in the public setting of a gallery space.” In other words, it’s another modern attempt to redefine the arcade as a social gallery. The more intriguing and communicative their exhibit, the better their argument, so to that end the NYU Game Center has specially commissioned three of the four games to suit its ambitions:

One of the goals of the Game Center is to support the New York game scene and to encourage experimental and innovative work by local independent game designers. To pursue this goal we intend to commission small-scale games on an ongoing basis. We believe that games, like other creative forms, can thrive outside the context of commercial development.

The other three featured games are Robin Arnott‘s Kenji Eno-esque Deep Sea, “a graphics-free, audio-only game about the terrors of deep sea diving”;
Matt Parker’s Recurse, “a manic game of twisting bodies, quick reactions, and physical feedback”; and Eric Zimmerman’s and Nathalie Pozzi’s Sixteen Tons, “a four-player game of strategy and negotiation”. This final game is the odd man out, as it’s not really a videogame and it was commissioned for the Art History of Games conference this past January.