Robbo. Walkthrough

Robbo. Walkthrough is a hybrid piece in a form of text generator, as well as an analogue book. The text itself is generated on the 8-bit Atari computer, and has premiered as a wild demo on the demoscene party Silly Venture 2k17 in Gdańsk. The piece has been programmed in Pascal by Wojciech Bociański (known in the Atari scene as Bocianu) with soundtrack by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker.) The concept and text has been created by Piotr Marecki.

The first part of the title is an allusion to the game Robbo (1989,) a cult Polish production for the 8-bit Atari, while the second part references walkthrough, i.e. the text providing clues of how to finish a game, a popular genre in the digital media fiel,. However, Robbo is a literary (or rather: nonsensical) rendition of a walkthrough. The work is 56 minutes long, and constitutes an attempt to create digital ambient literature.

The analogue book itself has also been created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer has been transcribed on the editor, and then assembled using Calamus, a program created in 1987 for use in the Atari ST/TT work environment. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – have been created by the Atari enthusiasts, premiered on the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among the retro computers enthusiasts.

While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also describes how the short-lived technologies are often replaced by so-called killer apps. An answer for this kind of technological acceleration is the practice of returning to the discarded and dead media or technologies (in this case the Atari computer) which can provide a critical commentary to this acceleration, at the same time preserving the cultural content in the excess-based contemporaneity, its circulation and repractice.

(Source: Author's Description)