Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment

Play Online (mobile-friendly)

Description

You can do it Sisyphus! Be the boulder! Keep on rollin’! Don’t stop! Never give up! No retreat! No surrender! No end in sight! Just delicious Greek torment as far as the eye can see and as fast as the fingers can type!

(Note that the above cutesy description is no longer quite accurate since I’ve “upgraded” the game to work with mobile and now you click the mouse or tap the screen to labour away in your punishments. Oh well.)

Description

Originally released on 30 November 2011, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment was written in ActionScript 3 using Adobe’s FlashBuilder 4.5 and the excellent Flixel library.

The new playable version has been ported to JavaScript using the equally excellent Phaser game framework. It uses sound effects made in bfxr. The font in Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment is Commodore 64 Pixelized by Devin Cook. If you’re really, really paying attention, you might notice that the hill for Sisyphus differs a little from the original game in that it shows a plateau. I decided I like it that way more.

Press

* BoingBoing

• The Verge
• Edge
• Open Culture
• Joystiq
• Kotaku
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun
• Slate

Exhibitions

• The Name of the Game at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery
• Art & the Viewser at the Allegheny College art gallery
• Rausch: Festival fuer digitale Kunst at the European Academy of Art.
• Voluntary Attempts to Overcome Necessary Obstacles at EFA Project Space (Catalog)
  • Review in the New York Times: What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries Right Now
  • Review in Game Developer: Inside Overcoming Necessary Obstacles — an introspective games exhibition

Among others!

Documentation

• Code repository (includes the new JavaScript source code as well as the Flash Builder version from 2011)
• Journal (blog posts written while I was making the original Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, almost none!)
• Download the original .swf file of Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment from the repository if you want

License

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.