Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/22/kickstarting-a-game-where-you.html
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At first I thought “cool” but then I realized that what I meant was actually “fuckin’ creepy.”
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You’re not a fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games then?
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I think I’ll save my money until they roll out version 2 of the game, where you get to drive full size tanks around the real Pripyat.
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Could be a new scenario for Girls in Panzers. (Japanese animé, check it out)
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I kind of love the idea - there were some old arcade games that used little miniatures that always intrigued me - but essentially they’re making a multi-player video game with a whole lot of problems and expenses (that still won’t be able to compete with video games where you can blow shit up).
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It’s not the location it’s the reality crossover that I find a bit, fraught(?)
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I recently learned there’s a whole fetish subculture centered around giant women stomping on helpless cities…
That doesn’t seem particularly sexual. Where’s the fetish?
So you drive a little tank around a miniature model of a condemned city. I don’t know whether to ask what’s the point, or where’s the fun?
They don’t make specific claims, they just say they explored many options to find the best solution, and the demo is playable and quite charming.
It does remind me of the arcade games Shuck mentions above that, rather than utilizing early computer graphics, piloted a camera through a miniature set based on user control. I seem to recall a racing game, but surprisingly my google-fu turns up no evidence of the existence of such a game.
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er, they don’t make specific claims about the latency.
Hey, don’t ask me, it’s not my kink. But it is somebody’s.
Now I’m obsessed with finding info on these old analog model-and-camera-based arcade games of which you speak, as I remember playing one as a kid. My google searches are dead ends. Maybe there was just the one machine at that one arcade in the Seattle area, and it was actually a 60s-era model-board-based flight simulator surpluses from Boeing or something to which someone had added a coin acceptor?
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Urmm, because you could get the exact same effect more easily (and probably better, and certainly more reliably) by making a regular video game which could be played by unlimited numbers of people at the same time, 24/7?
You could probably make more money simply by charging admission to a good model townscape. Making a model and then having it only accessible via Skype seems perverse.
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Asking for a friend?
Yeah, it would be easier, cheaper (to build and run), more interactive, more scalable, etc. as a video game. There’s a wonderful perversity about it - they’ve taken old, pre-digital simulation technology and used the latest digital technology to make it playable in new ways. But it’s been totally superseded by all the other digital technology that’s developed in the mean time as well (and which actually predates the networking tech that makes this possible). It’s like creating a robotic horse to ride around on city streets instead of a car…
Mostly I’ve read about them in books, but I have really vague memories of seeing something as a kid. I have some memory of a sub game that relied on mirrors rather than cameras. The cameras were definitely used for the old flight simulators, though:
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I’m pretty sure the simulator game I played was a driving game that moved a camera around a physical model of a course. Would love to find a reference or a note that it existed.
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This is the literal physical embodiment of Lungfishopolis! If I had any money I would send it all to them. I’ll send a few bucks next month.
I’d rather go to the real Pripyat. You can, but not for very long.
