Marcel Winatschek

The Arcade Ate Itself and Liked It

Pong existed before most of us had words for what a video game was. Pac-Man followed, then Space Invaders, and between the three of them they probably account for more collective human hours than sleep. The founding myths. The ones you still recognize even if you’ve never touched a joystick in your life.

Dutch developers kingPenguin had the unreasonable idea of combining all three into a single thing for a game jam. The result is Pacapong, and it works, which is the part that surprises me most. You’d expect a mashup like this to collapse under its own premise, but the chaos has its own logic, its own rhythm.

Donkey Kong shows up mid-game, hurling barrels across the screen, because apparently nobody told him this wasn’t his game. That a couple of indie developers pulled this off over a weekend while major studios spend years producing something half as inventive says everything about where the good ideas actually live right now.