Somebody Tell Ebert That Video Games Are Now Art

Roger Ebert may not think highly of video games as art, but MoMA does. The latest installation at their MoMA PS1 gallery is playable video game, which lets you run through a 16-bit Communist China landscape as a Red Army soldier.

Created by Chinese artist Feng Mengbo, Long March: Restart is a side-scrolling brawler where you battle ghouls, monsters, and military foes with the help of Coca-Cola cans characters from the Mario and Street Fighter franchises (it’s undetermined at this time if there’s a boss level where you battle a giant e-waste monster). The game follows the events of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Long March” in 1934, when Mao Zedong’s army had to retreat across 8000km of rough terrain to escape Chinese Nationalist forces.

On the more techie side, eight projectors were required for the installation, which is about as widescreen as it gets, and there are two screen for your gaming enjoyment. The mainscreen shows the video game in standard format. The second screen behind the gamer is scaled up relative the avatar’s position on screen, so that the gamer can experience the virtual world from the perspective of the avatar. The exhibit is up through April 4. [MoMA PS1 via Complex via Hypebeast]