Syllabus: Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes

Now here is a class from which we could all learn something.

Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Spe­cial Top­ics in Game Design and Analy­sis, Spring 2010. Geor­gia Insti­tute of Technology.

Hacks are works pro­duced by mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions to exist­ing games by dis­as­sem­bling bina­ries, ana­lyz­ing the mean­ing and pur­pose of the result­ing source code, iden­ti­fy­ing desir­able changes (whether slight or sig­nif­i­cant) and imple­ment­ing those changes.

Remakes are recre­ations of ear­lier works, irre­spec­tive of the hard­ware plat­form of orig­i­nal cre­ation or recre­ation. Remakes have a long his­tory in other media, par­tic­u­larly in film and tele­vi­sion, as well as in com­mer­cial videogames.

Demakes are retro-inspired reimag­in­ings of mod­ern games, as if they had been cre­ated on ear­lier hard­ware. Demakes are not nec­es­sar­ily cre­ated to run on older machines, but their design and behav­ior are con­strained by the real or per­ceived con­straints of vin­tage systems.

I adore the empha­sis on tech­no­log­i­cal pro­duc­tion. Notice that it is not sub­servient to the­ory, or even dis­tinct from it: Engage­ment with the tech­nol­ogy is, in itself, an act of theo­ria, an act of contemplation.

Review the syl­labus at Bogost’s website.

via Lori Emer­son.