A Modern Tribute to Retro Gaming

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overly complicated way. In this case, I have created a Rube Goldberg machine that uses elements and references from the era of retro video games in order to develop a sort of tribute to it.

The full-length Rube Goldberg, which features Mario, Pacman, Tetris, Donkey Kong and more can be seen here.

Designer's Notes

The brief required a 3D spatial composition structured as a ‘Rube Goldberg’ device, where one event would initiate a chain reaction of following events. It is to have a strong design aesthetic and concept, as well as be technically functional and brought to life with audio. The selected concept was ‘Retro Video Games’.

Through careful planning and iterating paper drafts, a proactive approach was taken due to the ambitious nature of the project. As the Rube Goldberg device occupied 3 dimensions, it was important to be considerate of how the space would be used. Controlling the movement and orientation of a camera in a digital 3D space was also interesting, as it allowed me to position it, and track the chain of events however I saw fit.

Due to almost all of the elements in the Rube-Goldberg machine being drawn from actual video games, their appropriate sounds and music were also incorporated to maintain the iconic and nostalgic identity of the video. After some research, appropriate sources were found to gather the required sounds.

Ultimately, this project was more of a technical challenge, as the sheer workload in producing stylised content and including many notable games was incredibly great. The final device can be divided into distinctive segments, where each game is highlighted, but is still seamless in nature. Many tools were used and strengthened in the production of this project, such as Blender3D and Unity3D, with the programming being done in C#.

As this was a university assignment, many of my peers were all required to make their own kind of Rube Goldberg machine in unity3D. In order to assist them with the development process, a tool was programmed using C#, which i name the 'Versatile' tool, as it allowed for easy-to-control transformation and rotation animations and more, all done through the unity UI.