Snake — Multiplayer Game on the Humboldt Forum

For Berlin leuchtet 2018 RE:SORB turned the Humboldt Forum in the rebuilt Berliner Schloss into a multiplayer 3D game based on Snake. Visitors played it live, with the building itself as the playfield. The festival ran from 28 September to 14 October that year under the motto ‘Licht aktiviert’.

The game ran on the modern east façade, which faces the Spree. Its yellow trails of light moved across the window grid, and spectators watched from the railing on the opposite bank of the river.

Players used custom-made brass controllers and played against each other as U-Bahn drivers, steering their trains across the façade. The game was supported by BVG, Berlin’s public transport company. Stefan Ihmig designed and programmed the game and built the controllers himself.

A slightly modified version ran a few weeks later at the third Potsdamer Lichtspektakel, from 2 to 4 November 2018, on the façade of the Bahnhofspassagen at Potsdam Hauptbahnhof, where visitors steered the snake across the station façade by the Babelsberger Straße exit.

Snake is one of the classic games RE:SORB has put on façades; pinball is another: Pin-Wall, played on the façade of the Preciosa Sangre church at the Urban Screens festival in Cáceres, Spain, in 2009 and 2010. In interactive projection mapping, the image is computed live rather than played back as a film.

Credits

• Concept, game design, programming and custom brass controllers: Stefan Ihmig