Multibowl is one of my favourite emulation projects because it’s a rare example of using emulators creatively, rather than for nostalgia or research.

It’s a 2016 game by Bennett Foddy and AP Thompson that reimagines older existing games as smaller pieces of a new, Super Mario Party-like experience. Two players randomly join one of 300 games – sometimes in medias res – with a small explicit goal that can be accomplished in about ~30 seconds, after which a point is awarded, another game is loaded, and so on.

All of this is done through actual emulation and fast switching of games’s original code:

Regarding the game choices, at the outset, I wanted to curate a list of moments of gameplay that would be meaningful if played for just a short period of time. Sometimes it’s obvious – you can take a moment from a fighting game where both players are low on health, or play a sports game from the start until the first point is scored. So that’s where I started. Over time, I figured out that you could make exciting moments in games that are not otherwise interesting for a competitive duel. For example, in Dodonpachi (a bullet hell game) we take away the player’s guns and challenge them to stay alive in a huge hail of bullets.

For games that were designed as cooperative experiences, I eventually gravitated toward the structure ‘score more points but do not die’, which forces the players to calibrate how much risk they take relative to the other player.

This excerpt is from a 2017 interview of Foddy by Seb Chan from ACMI. There are many interesting moments in that interview, such as the issue of curation:

Multibowl is not a very precise historical curation like you might make for a museum exhibition, where you can only show a couple of dozen things at most. It’s a huge driftnet of games. There is no quality or historical significance standard, and no attempt to balance out the games in terms of nationality or gender. The only curatorial instinct that it follows is to find the most diverse set of game ideas. With each piece distilled down to a randomly-selected 30-second slice, there’s room for an infinite number of them.

In fact, contrary to a museum curation, the point of Multibowl is to have too many games for a single player to see. It’s best when it feels too big to grasp. I think, now that there are 300 games in there, it’s starting to feel that way.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to actually play Multibowl outside of special events, given copyright issues. In addition to general emulation copyright murkiness, Foddy adds, “I don’t think the actual bits of actual games have ever been used as the fabric of a larger game before.”

However, a really fun introduction to Multibowl is another art project from a now-defunct comedy duo Auralnauts, who actually played Multibowl pretending to be Kylo Ren and Bane, to hilarious results:

I realized recently that I conflated two similar user-interface comedy skits.

This one is from Sean Wing from 2023:

And this older one is from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, from 2009:

Speaking of Tim and Eric, this one was also funny and ostensibly on topic for this blog!

(And re: previous post – I had to cut a new version of University font with the Ü glyph just for TAARGÜS in the title.)

This from a blog post by my friend Glenn Fleishman about audio/​video settings in macOS just made me laugh:

It’s doubly funny if you are aware of Fleishman’s extensive experience in printing.

Also, this:

I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.

In 2009, there was a strange one-off build of Chromium with a guy’s face in place of the close box:

If I remember the story correctly, this was neither a bug, nor an Easter egg, but instead a joke’y punishment for not delivering the correct asset on time.

A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012.

Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality” story:

Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist, since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 metre (3 feet) over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land.

Savage from heliographe.studio on Threads (via Daring Fireball):

Perhaps the only ever musical that’s about a buggy piece of software. From the inimitable Cabel Sasser, this 2006 video about Saints Row, with three songs and a goddamn reprise at the end.

It’s very good.

my car door’s freaking out
it seems to be forever in the concrete barricade
I wonder how I’m ever gonna drive away
this really is isn’t my day
the sparks are flying
people dying
metal frying
and I wonder if there’s more to life
or if I’ll find that this is really it
this game is a piece of work

Made me laugh. lanyardigan on Bluesky: