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Ecco the Dolphin glitch art is all your vaporwave dreams come true

All images created by and belong to Sabato Visconti. /// In Sega’s absence, the 1992 undersea videogame Ecco the Dolphin has developed a perplexing life of its own. Back in 2010, musician Daniel Lopatin released a cassette tape limited to 100 copies that contained an album called “Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1.” Not only was Ecco‘s name in the title, but the tape’s artwork was a chopped-up image of the original game’s cover art (created by fantasy scene painter Boris Vallejo) as a tribute to it. As to the cassette tape itself, it contained 14 unnamed tracks of slowed down, fragmented, and…

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Slack’s error page is actually an interactive scene from a defunct game

It wasn’t long ago that working in America was defined by a common image: people gathering around an office water cooler every morning to drink coffee and discuss the latest episode of shows like Dancing with the Stars (team Bindi, by the way). However, with 1 in 5 Americans now working from home thanks to the rise of internet, that image has become a little more dated in recent years. Instead of a water cooler, these online workers often employ chat programs like Slack, which allow them a sort of virtual office-space to gather around. With it, they’re easily able to discuss…

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The vast, lurid possibilities of PNG glitches

Glitch art is wonderful. It has the potential to be beautiful and horrifying. The best is often both at the same time. It’s got so popular now that most of us can appreciate glitch art on a visual level. But when it comes to talking about it, well, we don’t really have a clue. There isn’t an established vocabulary surrounding glitch art so we’re left to just say “wow” or “wtf?!” We can do better.  One person who is helping with that is Tokyo-based artist UCNV. He’s delivered a document that aims to help us understand how to glitch PNGs. If…

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This videogame glitch wants to be an artist too

Over the weekend, Willy Chyr encountered a rare and beautiful demon inside the code for his upcoming spatial puzzler Relativity. Beyond being a mere bug, this unknown corruption has emerged from a new shader Chyr was toying around with while creating a series of conceptual screenshots he deemed the “Rorschach Test Series.” When he accidentally set the camera size too small, Chyr saw that the shader proceeded to warp the virtual architecture of the game into striking serendipitous tableaus on its own accord. It dwarfed his initial experiment. Rather than trying to eliminate the effect, as he presumably would with…

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A new Mario 64 glitch has been discovered, and it’s worth $1000

The world of speedrunning is a mad, mad, mad one. It’s playing a videogame obsessively to the point that you know it inside-out. A speedrunner will put hundreds of hours into a videogame, if not thousands, all in order to learn the shortest routes, and also to discover any way of breaking it to their advantage.  This is why a Mario 64 speedrunner going by the handle “Pannenkoek2012” has put a $1000 bounty on a newly discovered glitch. He will give that money to whoever can successfully replicate this glitch. Because that’s the problem with glitches: by their very nature,…

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Do not stop and do not think while playing Strawberry Cubes

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. STRAWBERRY CUBES (PC)  BY LOREN SCHMIDT  Strawberry Cubes is a platformer that gives you a toolset instead of a jump button. You already know too much. For this is a game that works by keeping everything secret and telling you nothing. It’s about navigating a lo-fi living maze comprised of broken memories located around your grandma’s house. But none of this makes sense. Nothing does. The only way to progress is to ask: what does this do? And then trying it out. You must…

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Moon Shadow turns you into a glitch artist by warping what your phone sees

Connor Bell obviously wants to live in a visually fragmented world composed of data glitches. One of psychedelic blemishes and askew electronics that bend canvasses into a lively state of decay would suit him. I know this because Bell is the co-creator of Glitch Wizard, which lets you frazzle photos, videos, and gifs as if it were the hacker’s preferred version of Instagram (and it may well be). But not only that. For the past few weeks, Bell has been letting me play around with another project of his, and it’s not unlike his last, this time being called Moon Shadow.…