Inspired by the aesthetics of cyberpunk and classics like William Gibson’s groundbreaking novel Neuromancer and Masamune Shirow’s futuristic work Ghost in the Shell, Brendon Chung of Blendo Games wants to make learning the basics of programming fun for non-programmers with his new action role-playing game (RPG) Quadrilateral Cowboy. Scheduled to be released in 2013, Chung told The Verge that “one of the ulterior motives of the game is to get people interested in learning very basic programming fundamentals.”
Twentieth-Century Cyberpunk
On Quadrilateral Cowboy‘s website, the elevator pitch states that it’s “Twentieth-Century Cyberpunk” and the tagline reads: “When you have a top-of-the-line hacking deck armed with a 56.6k modem and a staggering 256k RAM, it means just one thing: you answer only to the highest bidder.”
Teaching Tech Literacy through Gaming
According to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Chung envisions the world of Quadrilateral Cowboy to be one where “… you are hired by corporations to make plans to infiltrate buildings and steal documents. But you’re not the one actually running the plans. You’re just making them and giving them to people who are way more athletic than you are. So the idea is that you’re just a guy sitting in a chair wearing VR goggles”. Chung also mentions that he’s a self-taught programmer and that he used his background as someone without formal training to show that anyone (given the right tools) can learn the basics of programming.
Hacking and Hollywood
It might sound like nothing more complicated than typing commands into a virtual computer. However, Chung explains to The Verge that he wants you to “feel like that Hollywood depiction of a hacker, where they have to type really fast and things happen in the world. There’s just something really tactile about that.” People who grew up watching movies like the cyberthriller Hackers (starring Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller) may finally get the chance to play out their own mini-version of a genius hacker fighting an evil corporation (or in this game, a genius hacker offering his services for sale).
About Blendo Games
Blendo Games is an independent game studio founded by Brendon Chung. A one-man operation, he’s developed several games including Atom Zombie Smasher, Flotilla, Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, Air Forte, Grotto King, Pilot Light, and Pathways Redux. Blendo Games has been awarded with Best Arthouse Game in 2008 (for Gravity Bone) by Game Tunnel, Best 20 Indie Games in 2010 (for Flotilla) by Edge Magazine, and nominated for Game of the Year in 2011 (for Atom Zombie Smasher) by the Indie Game Magazine.
(Featured Image and Article Images Credit: Blendo Games)
