Game Over (at)

game over – a musical 2D game engine

The player is meant to explore various game worlds and interact freely with the surroundings and inhabiting creatures. The game worlds are collages of well-known vintage video game genres, sometimes even juxtaposing contradictory "game modes", like side scrolling, top-down dungeon crawler, NES 'Mode 7' or isometric pseudo 3D, creating bizarre and confusing scenarios.

The possibilities for musical discovery are manifold: everything the player touches will react with either new sounds or by changing the overall sound of the environment. There are many different autonomous non-player-characters which the player can interact with in various ways, leading to suprising musical patterns. Furthermore, the author intentationally kept certain glitches and loopholes in the game architecture ("easter eggs") which can be discovered by the curious player.

game_over was developed within the artistic research project "GAPPP" at the Institute of Electronic Music in Graz, Austria and was founded by the "österreichische Wissenschaftsfond" (project number AR364-G24). It has won the "Student Award for Excellence in the Application of New Technologies in Sound Art and Sound Design" at the international symposium "klingt gut! Symposium on Sound" in Hamburg, Germany, and has been presented at the international conference NIME 2018 at Virginia Tech, USA.

Christof Ressi is an Austrian composer, arranger, programmer and multimedia artists. As a composer, he works in various fields of music such as contemporary classical, jazz, dance/theater or experimental electronics. Besides writing instrumental music, he has a keen interest in interactive live-electronics and audio-visual art and is currently working on an extended series of pieces exploring various aspects of video game programming. He arranges music for all kinds of ensembles and instruments, including big band and orchestra. Together with clarinet player Szilard Benes he regularly performs as a duo, playing both audio-visuals compositions and improvisations. His music has been performed all over the world, such as Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, China, UK, USA and South-Africa. He has won several prizes and his computer music work has been featured at international conferences such as „klingt gut! symposium on sound“ in Hamburg or „NIME – new interfaces for musical expression“ at Virginia Tech. He has been part of the artistic research project „GAPPP“ (www.gappp.net) at the IEM in Graz.