Tiny bagels and pots of hot coffee wait patiently on a fold-out table in a a small classroom on the southeast end of New York University campus. It’s an early Saturday morning in late June and most of NYU’s students are on Summer break. But for the group of artists, programmers, hackers and musicians about to gather around that breakfast table, the most important class of the year is about to begin.
Using a couple of open-source tools, a bit of programming know-how and a fair helping of imagination, the participants of this 2-day workshop are about to do something wonderful – They’re going to lay the foundations for their own 8-bit NES games, and become the next generation of retro game designers.
With breakfast and beverages depleted, the group makes their way into a technology lab down the hall. They’re walking into a computer science course, but not the kind that any university would normally offer. The instructor steps forward and passes around a knock-off NES console clone from China, the same kind that you usually see on display in mall kiosks and dollar stores. There’s something special about this one though – It costs only $10, and is distributed as a learning computer to low-income families in developing countries around the world. There’s only one problem: It needs software.
Read more about Playpower’s 8-bit game design workshops and their mission to produce the next wave of quality learning software at Racketboy.
