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: