Fridge Magnet Game Dev at GDC

Fun & Games Home
Fridge Magnet Game Dev at GDC

Walking through the Moscone West Exhibition Hall, GDC attendees are coming across what appears to be a magnetic board of over-sized fridge poetry. Except, instead of surreal, incomprehensible verse, the words are assembled into game proposals. Participants select nouns, verbs, adjectives, and genres from a table of magnetic word salad and arrange them on the board. Once a semi-coherent title and genre are assembled, concept art for the titles are sketched out on adjacent Wacom stations by industry professional artists, including Levi Ryken of Double Fine Productions and Greg Broadmore from New Zealand’s Weta Workshop (he of the District 9 concept design and the Dr. Grordbort line of steampunk rayguns).

This crowdsourced idea generator, dubbed the Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic, is the latest work of Nick Ahrens of iam8bit. After his successful piece at last year’s GDC, entitled “Painting with Pixels,” Ahrens wanted to create something even wilder. With generated titles so far including “Tyler Perry’s 3D Dino Ninja Revolution,” and “Misadventures of Deadly Hamster Bieber Killers,” this week-long project will certainly be generating a lot of laughs, if nothing else.


Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic

6 thoughts on “Fridge Magnet Game Dev at GDC

  1. sshusss says:

    Thanks Blake – great piece! And love the fridge magnet game.

  2. High Technology » Blog Archive » Interview with Greg Broadmore at GDC says:

    […] scoping out the Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic action, I ran intro Greg Broadmore. Greg is one of the concept designers from the illustrious Weta […]

  3. MAKE | Interview with Greg Broadmore at GDC says:

    […] scoping out the Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic action, I ran intro Greg Broadmore. Greg is one of the concept designers from the illustrious Weta […]

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

I design games for work and for fun. I recently graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design, and am now employed as a designer at Toys for Bob.

View more articles by Blake Maloof

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK