Feng Mengbo. Long March: Restart (installation view, Guangdong Museum, 2008). Video game installation (color, sound). The Museum of Modern Art. Given anonymously. © 2010 Feng Mengbo We all know a little—and many of you know a lot!—about video games and gaming culture. Few of us, however, have actually attempted and succeeded in creating our own video game. Not only has the artist Feng Mengbo done so, but the video game he created is so large in scale that it requires installation in an exhibition hall. Mengbo started off this pursuit in a traditional enough way for an artist: in 1993 he created a series of paintings titled Game Over: Long March. But as the title hints, Mengbo had video games in mind all along—the forty-two paintings, which the artist called “game snapshots,” were clustered in a way so as to depict a “side-scrolling game,” but on canvas. A “side-scrolling game” or “side-scroller” is a video game in which the action is viewed from a profile-view camera angle, and your character generally moves from the left side of the screen to the right (think Super Mario Brothers). The character in Mengbo’s work is a small Red Army soldier sweeping his way across China, wiping out ghosts, demons, and deities, much in the vein of Mario wiping out Koopa Troopas on his way to rescue Princess Toadstool. It wasn’t until 2008, fifteen years after beginning Game Over: Long March and five years after acquiring his first computer, that Mengbo could realize his dream of creating an artwork using the medium of video games. The final work, Long March: Restart, was acquired by MoMA last year. One thing that makes Long March: Restart so special is that instead of sitting in front of a typical television monitor, you, the gamer, are instead dwarfed by an enormous screen, approximately 80 by 20 feet. Your avatar (the small Red Army soldier) and the pixels around him are magnified tenfold and projected behind you on a second enormous screen, the sparkling pixels a fitting homage to the enormously popular (but graphically simple) 1980s side-scrolling video games. A second element that makes the work so unique is, in Mengbo’s own words, the artist’s “original intention in designing the installation, which lies in the continued use of the audience’s, i.e. the gamers’, way of motion as the chief measuring mechanism…I wanted to enable the character to move freely along the stretched scroll. Because of the vast space of the exhibition hall and the intentionally designed pace of the character, the gamer and the audience would have to dash to catch up with the character.” (via MoMA | New Acquisition: Feng Mengbo’s Long March: Restart)