Hi folks! It's been a little while ... We've been pretty wrapped up working on KRZ in all its motley permutations & extensions, and neglected this here newsletter. We have a few process-and-background things we've been wanting to share for a while, along with some general progress & happenings. So!
Here's an update on where we've been & what we've been doing, followed by a closer look at some of the research & process behind the "Xanadu" scenes in Act III.
Where we've been and what we've been doing.
Our biggest occupation has obviously been working on Act IV. We're happy with the direction it's taking, but it has been a longer road than we anticipated. So, thanks for bearing with us. We hope it's worth the wait. Here's a teaser from a scene we're just wrapping up (click through for the full image):
We've also been carrying on with the transmedia weirdness in & around KRZ's latest interlude, "
Here And There Along The Echo
." So far we've held three performative auctions for handmade, weird telephones. The first was
on eBay
in November. The second, in December, was auctioned over
a live video stream
. We sold the third weird telephone just a few weeks ago in a live auction at Chicago cinema
The Nightingale
, at an event organized by the
Video Game Art Gallery
.
The VGA / Nightingale show was a really fun event. We gave a little play-through and informal talk, Chaz from VGA played auctioneer, and then Ben gave a performance. Here are some photos taken by Tony Rabit of
Tiny Missile
:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/90404769@N05/sets/72157649171972394/
.
Our other big endeavor recently has been adding gamepad support to KRZ. We dove pretty deep and ended up rethinking a lot of our code & design around movement & interaction. Maybe we'll write another newsletter on that topic somewhere down the road.
OK! Back to Xanadu ...
The PDP-1
The computer used to run Xanadu in Act III is based on a real machine from 1959 called the PDP-1. The PDP-1 was host to several important moments in the history of computing -- maybe most notably here, Steve Russell's "
Spacewar!
," which is one of a few games people like to name as the "first" videogame. We chose the PDP-1 as a reference primarily because of that *gorgeous* display, but it works well thematically as a ruined monument to the colossal scale and expense on view in earlier computer moments. A PDP-1 in its heyday cost over $100,000, so early hackers working on the PDP-1 would only have had access to it through an institution like the university where Donald, Lula & Joseph worked. The vulgarity of this spending wasn't lost on them -- the PDP-1's text-editing software was called "expensive typewriter."
The EMU Modular Synthesizer
Here are a few excerpts of the music Ben composed for the Xanadu sequence:
Xanadu Excerpt: Crystal Room
Xanadu Excerpt: Sleep Music
Xanadu Excerpt: In Forest
About this work, Ben says:
"Often while working on audio for KRZ, I will receive a build of a scene or environment from Tamas and Jake and then populate it with audio as a response. A lot of the material that I was pulling from for the Xanadu audio was made over the course of my last semester in school, when I was able to spend about four hours a week with the EMU modular synthesizer there. Built in the late 70's specifically for the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the EMU has been maintained over the years and is both a relic from that time as well as a source of vibrantly new and interesting sounds. Over the course of a few months, I amassed a large library of raw material.
It was a fun challenge to use analog synthesis to construct all of the sounds, which involved sifting through long stretches of audio while listening for interesting moments to collage together, and supplement with another old synthesizer I stole (temporarily) from a roommate."
Here's a video of Ben playing the EMU system at SAIC:
Thanks for reading. More soon!
-jake+tamas+ben
