Playing Tetris in an Odd Place
I like Tetris; who doesn’t? The rules are simple, and it’s a good test of strategy and speed without eye hurting graphics. I’ve played it on a few Nintendo handhelds, my PC, and on Sony’s gaming consoles. The people over at MIKONTALOLIGHTS in Finland developed a platform to play it on a building by using the windows as light pixels and a cell phone as the controller. Check out the video (hosted on CollegeHumor):
It’s similar to a project from Blinkenlights and the CCC based in Germany. Their project also used a mobile phone to control lights (windows) on a building, except they were playing pong and uh, MIKONTALOLIGHTS used color. The Blinkenlights and CCC projects are still cool as they’ve done a lot of animated graphics on the side of a building. Check out their gallery if you haven’t already.
Hmm.. weird they didn’t ask me any kind of permission to publish my video on collegehumor.
And first attempt of tetris on Mikontalo was to my knowledge around 1990 so it is not clone project in that way.
The thing in Finland is also that that this size of building is one of the biggest in Finland and thus makes it a lot more difficult to archive more spectacular graphics with windows.
But we had fun all the time: planning, coding, assembling, playing, enjoying and even while tearing it apart.
But well.. we would do it again any time. Just give us some new challenges.