Description
Joost van Dongen · 2012–2016
Half concert, half twin-stick shooter. A cellist sits on stage with a projection behind them and improvises; players from the audience pick up game controllers and drive tanks at the fortress the cellist is defending. What the cello plays is what the fortress does — melodies control the guns, dissonant notes set off the flamethrowers, and different note types call up different weapons.
Nothing is scored for accuracy. Unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band, the system does not check the cellist against a written part; it reads what they choose to play, and the cellist is simultaneously improvising music and tuning the difficulty so that the attackers have a fair fight. The audience’s side of it needs no musical skill at all: a controller, and a tank.
Van Dongen is a game developer — Proun, and lead programmer and co-founder of Ronimo Games — and has written up the mapping from playing to weapons on his development blog.
⚠ The number of attacking players is given as four in Gameful Compositions in Interactive Computer Music (pp. v–vi, 66); the project’s own site says only “players from the audience”, so treat four as the described setup rather than a fixed rule.
source — cellofortress.com · how the cello controls the game, dev blog
video: “Cello Fortress trailer: How the cello controls the game” — Joost van Dongen, YouTube
images: Joost van Dongen, cellofortress.com