I’ve been going to New York Comic Con since 2006, and during that time I’ve seen a lot of unusual things: a cosplayer in a 10-foot-tall, 85-pound Bumblebee costume; 659 people dressed as Spider-Man in a single room; a fan telling William Shatner to shut up and being booed by the crowd into the shadow realm. Yet nothing has been quite as unusual as a fully-loaded Volkswagen Atlas parked in the middle of the show floor, adorned with tetriminoes and occupied by smiling attendees playing Tetris on the dashboard. Luckily, I was able to enter the SUV and see what all the fuss was about. Even more luckily, I was joined by Anthony Cliquot, the CEO of N-Dream, the company behind AirConsole.
If you’re unfamiliar with AirConsole, here’s the rundown. It’s an online, hardware-less video game console that uses an existing monitor as the screen and smartphones as the controllers. You can play AirConsole games on the TV, via a web browser, or — and this is where the Atlas comes into play — in the car. The company has partnered with several automotive manufacturers, including Volkswagen and BMW, to integrate a library of multiplayer games directly into a car’s infotainment system, which is a digital display in the dashboard of a vehicle for, you guessed it, information and entertainment.
As someone who plays video games on traditional hardware and relies on a Switch 2 for portable gaming during lengthy travel times, the idea of AirConsole, particularly in a vehicle, didn’t immediately grab me. Cliquot was eager to explain. “I think the vision behind this is simple,” he said. “I feel that travel time is boring. And I want to turn travel time into meaningful experiences that are shared moments that people actually remember.”
In order to hammer home his vision, Cliquot set up a game of Tetris on the Atlas’ 15-inch infotainment screen. By scanning a QR code on the screen with my iPhone, I was able to immediately sync with the game and transform my smartphone into a wireless controller. Everything was there at my fingertips: rotate clockwise, rotate counterclockwise, soft drop, hard drop, hold piece, etc. The CEO beamed as he walked me through the ins and outs of the controller: “I feel that you need to have the right level of love in the control scheme or else it’s not working. And so this is where a company like The Tetris Company trusted us with our ability to deliver while providing us their science on all they’ve learned from their multi-platform experiences across all devices.”
Tetris on AirConsole supports up to four players across several different modes: Sprint, Marathon, Battle, and Online Battle. That last mode, Online Battle, piqued my curiosity the most. You can create private lobbies for friends, but you can also join randomly with other AirConsole equipped cars anywhere in the world.
Something about the idea of a group of friends crowded around the dashboard in New York City competing with a family on a road trip in San Francisco made me smile. “Obviously I’m a big fan of couch co-op and local multiplayer, which is basically at the base of our idea and what we did with AirConsole, but it doesn’t mean that we cannot provide things for this day and age, and competition is still one of the best motivators for people to come back and play a game,” said Cliquot. “So this is definitely something that we wanted to provide to our end users here in the cars.”
For the purposes of my demo, Cliquot picked Battle. It was very much the Tetris we all know and love, albeit with smartphone controllers. As we cleared lines and traded garbage blocks, we chatted about our memories of the game. I recalled my friends in high school destroying me in four-player The New Tetris on N64 and Cliquot recounted his time with the original portable version: “When I was a child, I used to play Tetris on my Game Boy. So full circle moment for me today; it’s about 30 years ago I played Tetris on a Game Boy in the backseat and we’re bringing Tetris back to the car.”
Note: for safety reasons, AirConsole and Tetris are only playable when the car is parked.
As we continued our epic contest, I noticed the lights on the car dashboard change. Cliquot explained that this version of Tetris comes with “immersive ambient lighting”. As players clear lines, the vehicle’s ambient lighting responds in real time, syncing to the color of the block that completed the most recent line. It was a minor thing, but it certainly added to the atmosphere.
After our match ended, Cliquot walked me through the results screen. I saw how many lines I cleared, my overall score, and even some information about my gameplay style and approach. I appreciate that the system keeps track of head-to-head matchups and trivial things like single line clears, double line clears, etc. I could see that sense of continuity inspiring players to return for more — if they already have access to a Volkswagen and subscribe to an In-Vehicle Premium plan, of course. I can’t imagine anyone would purchase a high-end vehicle just to play Tetris, even if it is, arguably, the perfect game.
As I exited the Atlas, trading the quiet comfort of the vehicle for the noisy, crowded aisles of the Comic Con show floor, Cliquot explained what made Tetris the ideal way to introduce AirConsole to convention-goers. “Everybody plays Tetris because it’s simple,” he said. “It’s not an easy game actually, but it is simple to understand how to play and it makes you want to go back.”
Full Article – https://www.vgchartz.com/article/469325/pair-of-lines-by-the-dashboard-light-tetris-comes-to-volkswagen/
