The Art of Atari

As you all pretty much know, when I was just a wee tot living in suburban Wisconsin, milking cows and drinking beer, I spent a lot of cold winters sitting in front of our (alarmingly) warm TV set playing classic Atari games like Missile Command, Adventure and Asteroids. Games that, when played on a home console in 1981, looked pretty much like ass. The graphics, as some of you will recall, were embarrassingly simple -- one game's soccer ball was another game's ICBM missile. The sound of an explosion in a space shooter might double as the sound of a crowd cheering on a football team. What I'm getting at here folks is that the narrative power of these 2-kilobyte game programs was extremely, extremely limited, so we had to actually use our own imaginations while playing our video games back then. Which, ironically, was something that I think was lost on many parents of the time, as they often lashed out against this wicked new video-technology that would most assuredly eat their children's souls and melt their brains.
But how do you market and sell a game that contains only a dot, a line and a wall of bricks to millions of sweaty, greasy teenage kids who can't wait to hop into their station wagons and cruise on over to Kay Bee Toys to pick up the latest radical game cartridge?

Like this:

Not real, but an incredible simulation.

Nope, not what you're thinking about at all when you're eight years old and spinning a paddle in your hand -- sorry, that sounded weird. But believe it or not, this approach ended up working well for Atari and having been initially run by a bunch of stoners and hippies anyway, they were very up on the idea of dedicating a fair amount of cash and resources to art and design right from the start.

So wouldn't you know it, some forty-odd years later and long after the original company imploded, someone has finally put together a book chronicling this hitherto overlooked aspect of our favorite video game behemoth, and it's available today in hardback.

Penned by Chicago-based designer, Tim Lapetino, The Art of Atari gives the reader a comprehensive overview of the various design initiatives employed by Atari over the course of its entire history and reveals the stories behind them as well.

From the official site:

"THE ART OF ATARI is the first official collection of such artwork. Sourced from private collections worldwide, this book spans over 40 years of the company’s unique illustrations used in packaging, advertisements, catalogs, and more.

Includes a comprehensive retrospective collecting game production and concept artwork, photos, marketing art, with insight from key people involved in Atari’s rich history, and behind-the-scenes details on how dozens of games featured within were conceived, illustrated, approved (or rejected), and brought to life!"

Pick up your copy for only $39.99 from their site by clicking the link below!

VISIT THE MAIN ART OF ATARI SITE HERE FOR MORE INFO

BONUS VIDEO: INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, TIM LAPETINO

Rubik-esque Art

Can you solve a Rubik's Cube? Me neither and I've been playing with the damned thing since 1980 and I'm ready to call it a day. But instead of throwing it against a brick wall and watching the colors fly, why not repurpose the frustrating geometry device into a tool for artistic expression? That's what Toronto, Canada's CubeWorks group has done and with great success. Utilizing the pieces of disassembled Rubik's Cubes, as well as delving into other mediums such as Lego bricks, dice and crayons, CubeWorks has created numerous works which can be seen in museums and galleries around the world. Earlier this year (2013) they even made it into the Guinness Book of World's Records with a portrait of the Macau skyline which took 85,794 seperate Rubik's Cubes to create! Check out some of their works and stop by their site if you get a chance, it's definitely worth a look.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE CUBEWORKS SITE

Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Music

In recent years, the art of producing 8-bit music on 8-bit hardware has been enjoying a sort of renaissance thanks to the generations of kids that grew up with primitive video-game music like the themes from Zelda and Mario. The digital music created on today's modern computers is generally done in 16-bit or 24-bit, both of which allow for a much finer audio resolution and thus much clearer sound than 8-bit. Then there's 1-bit sound, which was employed in 70s and 80s computers such as the Apple II and early IBM PCs to produce rudimentary sound effects and music for video games. In those types of computers, a signal would be sent to a small speaker directly from the CPU which would result in a simple click sound, and since the speaker was either on (making sound) or off (silent), the single click produced was considered to be 1-bit of audio information. Put enough of these click sounds together in rapid succession while varying the oscillation and you've produced a sine wave, one of the building blocks of synthesized tones. Sweat enough blood and you can actually make music with it as did electronic music artist, Tristan Perich. While there are quite a few 1-bit music artists floating around out there on the net, Tristan has gone one step further and created a 1-bit music album, titled "1-bit Music," entirely in hardware. That is, rather than release a recording of his music on a modern format such as mp3 or CD, Tristan's album combines the player and the music into a portable unit which consists of a simple electronic circuit assembled inside a standard CD case. The case itself has a headphone jack mounted on the side that allows the listener to experience 40 minutes of 1-bit music in, as Tristan puts it, the lowest possible representation of audio. You can't buy the album anymore (bummer) but you can visit Tristan's sites and get a glimpse into some really innovative forms of music and visual art, much of which is produced using the same technologies as the album.


CLICK HERE to visit Tristan's 1-BIT MUSIC site

CLICK HERE to go to Tristan's main site

CLICK HERE to explore more 1-bit music