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Games

Take A Ride Down The Pac-Man Highway

NotWorkingFilms are bringing classic video games into reality. Kinda.

When you were a kid playing video games, did you ever imagine the game appearing in the real world? Ever thought of looking up in the sky and seeing Space Invaders or being chased down the street by some kind of noisy red ghost? Well it looks like Italian film company NotWorkingFilms has been making films depicting exactly what this would be like.

They’ve been working on a series of short films based around classic video games, but in a way that integrates the games into our daily environments, seemingly without compromise. So you can journey down the hybrid reality of the Pac-Man superhighway in the Pac-Man Highway – Level 1 (above). Or see the city of Milan overrun by familiar gaming forms in Arcade City – Milan (below).

When watching the films (especially Arcade City) you can’t help being reminded of Patrick Jean's fantastic short film PIXELS (which we screened at our events last year), but here the graphics themselves are less solid and often 2D. In regards to the narrative, unlike Jean's pixel vs. reality warzone, the glowing entities of NotWorkingFilms’ game world drift through our own more like they’re meant to be here. And seeing them integrated into our own world so innately has got us wondering, how much easier would construction be if erecting a building were like a game of Tetris?

Perhaps in a few years when we get those AR goggles, traversing our cities and highways might be akin to something like this. Although driving along in the dark while trying to avoid ghost-splattered windshields might not be the safest way to get from A to B.