Interactive agency Running In The Halls (RITH) has laid claim to hosting the world’s largest playable projection on a historic industrial building in London, UK. The agency teamed up with AV equipment provider Blitz Communications to achieve the feat which saw the classic video game Pac-Man projected across a 2,219 square metre area, as witnessed by the Guinness Book of Records.
TV programme the Gadget Show and Pac-Man creator Namco Bandai commissioned the event to celebrate the 2014 launch of Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures game. The feat is said to have doubled the previously held record for a playable game on a projection mapped building surface.
“The game maps were entirely designed around the building,†explained Shay Moradi, a partner in RITH.
“The only really tricky part was doing multiple variations of the map so that we could find one that was playable. Ultimately we wanted genuine reactions from the people playing it, we wanted it to be a fun game.â€
The crew set up outside the ExCel building, which hosted the Plasa show earlier in the year, and projected onto the 1930s Millenium Mills building across the Royal Victoria Docks waterway. A surveyor had measured the whole building down to the centimetre beforehand. Six Barco FLM-HD20 projectors and the company’s ImagePRO video scaler were used for the project, as well as Extron DVI DA 8 Plus distribution amplifiers and Lightware Fiber TX110-RX 110 DVI fibre extenders.
RITH describes itself as an interactive agency that designs and develops apps, websites and large scale interactive installations. The firm found itself tasked with a similar projection mapping project on the same building last year, so the territory was not unfamiliar.
“The only thing we changed was some the colours to make them suitable for projection,†Moradi said.
“For instance the original Pac-Man uses a very deep blue which would have been suitable for CRTs back in the day but we went for a lighter blue to make it really shine and stand out. It looked like it was lasered onto the building, it was that bright.â€
After putting all this hard work in, the crew had a nail-biting wait for the giant controller to arrive which was to operate the game. It was delivered with just minutes to spare before the record attempt began.
The feat will be shown on UK TV Channel 5’s The Gadget Show on 9th December at 8pm.