tetris It has been immortalized in a playable McDonald’s plastic chicken nugget, a playable fake 7-Eleven Slurpee cup, and a playable wristwatch. But the most interesting way to play tetris Still captured on paper.
Last year the Tetris company partnered with Red Bull for a gaming tournament, resulting in the 150-meter-tall Dubai Frame landmark becoming the world’s largest playable space. tetris Installation using over 2,000 drones that act as pixels. Although the timing was a coincidence, Red Bull also published a 180-page gaming edition of The Red Bulletin Around the same time as the program, Lifestyle magazine was published, a limited number of copies of which were wrapped in a less lavish, but no less technically impressive, version of Alexei Pajitnov’s iconic puzzle game.
To create a playable gaming magazine, Red Bull Media House (the media wing of the company) took the help of Kevin Bates, who took the internet by storm in 2014 by creating an ultra-thin magazine. tetris-Playing business cards. In 2015, they launched the $39 Arduboy, a credit card-sized, open-source handheld, which attracted a thriving community of developers. Over the course of a decade, Bates also produced an equally pocketable pair tetris– Running handhelds that cost less than $30, and the shrunken USB-C Arduboy Mini.
The GamePop GP-1 Playable Magazine System (as it’s officially called) is the latest evolution of Bates’ mission to use existing, accessible, and affordable technologies to reimagine what a portable gaming device can be. Bates revealed during a call that it took “most of the last year” to develop The Verge. He would not give exact details of how his collaboration with Red Bull came about. But if you are looking to create an officially licensed version tetris It’s thin enough to flex, Bates has the experience, and he shared with us some of the technical details that go into implementing this construction.
While OLED display technology has given us tablet-sized devices that turn into smartphones, they are still expensive and fragile. To create a display that would be able to remain embedded in a flexible magazine cover without reinforcement, Bates created a custom matrix of 180 2 mm RGB LEDs mounted on a flexible circuit board only 0.1 mm thick. While the display and coin-cell batteries make it thick in some places – about 5mm at its thickest point – you really feel like you’re playing a handheld made of paper. The flexible circuit is joined between two sheets of paper to create a sleeve that wraps around a book-sized magazine, and it feels satisfyingly thin and flexible.
Flexible circuits are not a new idea. They have been used in electronics for decades. You can find them in quite a few old flip phones that now seem like antiques, and in almost every laptop. They are also often used to miniaturize devices that do not bend or twist at all, adding internal components where space is extremely limited. But it’s only been in the last five or six years that the technology has become available to smaller manufacturers, and Bates says he’s been “toying with flexible circuits for almost that long.” This collaboration was an opportunity to use what he had learned to create a device that would work outside of his workshop.
The display resolution of the GamePop GP-1 pales in comparison to the OLED screens used in folding phones, but Bates’ creation is far more durable. Not only has the game gone through specific security tests, Bates has also “hit it with a hammer a few times” to test its durability. Its display survived, but don’t try to do that with a folding phone. They are still much less durable.
Instead of buttons, the game uses seven capacitive touch sensors that are “printed directly into the copper layer of the board,” says Bates. There is no real mechanical reaction when pressed, but the elasticity of the paper helps them feel like a button when you press. Bates says the sensor’s response was specifically designed taking into account the thickness of the paper stock and glue used in the final print run. You are not going to follow tetris world record on the cover of a magazine, but the controls are satisfyingly responsive and the game is surprisingly much easier to play than other tetris Devices I’ve Tested.
how flexible it is tetris Cost of producing the game? Neither Bates nor Red Bull will disclose the total value of all the off-the-shelf and custom components you’ll find inside the magazine’s cover. But to help keep costs down, not all components are flexible. Inside the edge of the cover, next to the spine of the magazine, you’ll find a long but thin rigid PCB where an ARM-based 32-bit microprocessor is located along with four rechargeable LIR2016 3V coin cell batteries.
Like most devices now, the game can be recharged using a USB-C cable, but it’s not immediately obvious where. There is a deconstructed USB-C port hidden on the bottom edge of the magazine cover. Instead of a metal ring, its socket is a small paper pocket with a pin head inside. It doesn’t feel as durable as your phone’s charging port, but it’s a welcome alternative to making games disposable when the battery runs out.
Bates had to cut some corners. GamePop GP-1 delivers high scores, but is modern tetris Gameplay features such as previews of upcoming pieces and being able to save tetrominos for later are not included. It has sound effects, but when starting the game you only hear a small excerpt of the iconic tetris Subject. The game’s piezo speaker “uses almost the same amount of energy as it does to run the rest of the system,” says Bates, so it helps extend the life of small rechargeable batteries. He tells us that you can play for an hour or two this way, and that the battery will last for several months when not in use.
Red Bull produced approximately 1,000 copies of the magazine. It is only available online in Europe, but can also be found in some stores and newsstands, including Iconic Magazine in New York and Rare Mags outside Manchester in the UK. However, only 150 copies with playable covers were produced, and none were made available to the public. they were distributed tetris Competitors, people featured in magazines, influencers and select media.
Playable covers won’t revolutionize the print industry, or pave the way for smartphones we can roll up and put in our back pockets. The goal was to utilize existing technology in a way that gamers had not seen before.
Photography by Andrew Liszewski/The Verge
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