Does It Look Like A Good Old Gameboy Action Game? I Wish It Exist, BlackZone : The Silent Doom. You

More Everybody’s Balloon Fight / Minna no Balloon Fight screenshots.

Suzanne Treister 1991-1992 Fictional Videogame Stills

In the late 1980s I was making paintings about computer games. In January 1991 I bought an Amiga computer and made a series of fictional videogame stills using Deluxe Paint II. I photographed them straight from the screen as there was no other way to output them that I knew of apart from through a very primitive daisy wheel printer where they appeared as washed out dots.

The effect of the photographs perfectly reproduced the highly pixellated, raised needlepoint effect of the Amiga screen image. Conceptually this means of presentation was also appropriate in that it made it seem like I had gone into a videogame arcade and photographed the games there, lending authenticity to the fiction.

The first seven works on this page form a series titled, ‘Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?’

Many of these works were shown in London at the Edward Totah Gallery in March 1992 (view installation) and later that year at the Exeter Hotel in Adelaide, Australia. In 1995 the 'Q. Would you recognise a Virtual Paradise?’ series was shown in London at the Royal Festival Hall in the exhibition It’s a Pleasure, curated by Leah Kharibian.

Recent venues: Somerset House, London, 2018 view installation ; Akron Art Museum, Ohio, USA 2019 and tour; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2019/20 view installation

The original Amiga floppy disks which stored the image files are corrupt, but the photographic art works remain.

Today is my day off so i decided to do some summer cleaning, and i found a box of my old SNES cartridges in my crawlspace, haven’t looked at them since high school. Has anyone heard of this one? It has to be a weird bootleg but i’ve never seen it before. It won’t play, just goes to a black screen with ambient music playing. Kinda spooky.

Ahhhh! Finally finished this piece of fanart based on the wonderful manga Dungeon Meshi/ Delicious In Dungeon by Ryoko Kui. Big big thanks to SungWon Cho/ ProZD for putting the manga on my radar and the notion of turning it into a game from this tweet.

With this in mind and mouse in hand I hope I have done the source material justice and it’s as much a pleasure to view as it was making it.

Yet again, thank you SungWon Cho for the prompt, and thank you Ryoko Kui for a wonderful read!

redo of an earlier mock-up

Games that don’t exist

Planet of the Apes (DOS, 1990)