Spaced Invaders

In early 2015, I along with my fellow nerd Tyler were given an esteemed People’s Liberty grant. The PL grants were small stipends meant to spark the minds of the Cincinnati creatives in various areas of community and the arts. Our pitch, was simple enough in a mostly abandoned city of Cincinnati at the time. Let’s play a game. A modified version of Space Invaders to be exact, and let’s make it building sized, react to human movement, and light up the neighborhood like a Christmas tree bringing color to the many, many, many neglected spaces in the city at the time. Tyler went ahead and rebuilt Space(D) Invaders into a 3D world using Unity. Me? Im the more hands on guy, I stripped down an old arcade cabinet to house our motion tracking system, and then tackled the controller actions by upgrading some MegaMan™ cannons to bluetooth commands into our system. Simple right? The result was a summer of debauchery. A sublime campaign around the city encouraging users to follow an invaders account for the impending fight instructed our followers on a precise day/time of our popup events. From there, well, we just had fun.