We always feel excited to spread out as people asked which games(s) memorized your childhood with little folks. Super Mario Bros, Contra, the King of Fighters 97…

“GameOn Blooming” China Tour 2018, as the world’s first immersive experience exhibition based-on video games, has collected over 150 classic games and countless unforgettable memories for people in thirties, forties, and fifties. The exhibition organized jointly by Blooming Invest and Barbican Center London has ended now.

Started from the concept of video games, the architecture was enveloped in a colorful pallet of mapping plains with posters to simulate the effect in past pixelated video games. The design conceived by PleasantHouse Design and INTACT Studio intentionally blends in the commercial block for shopping, art gallery, and nightlife. The concavo-convex structure is filled with a kind of surreal visual perception, bringing endless novelty for visitors in it and satisfying the curiosity of all players with an expectation to explore it.

“The filed of modern video games involves a wide range of industries: artists, musicians, writers, actors, programmers, and game designers. All these disciplines are applied to a specific project to realize the culture and value of modern video games”, said Neil McConnon, the Head of International Enterprises at Barbican Center, London.

As a video game exhibition at the front end of the trend, GAME ON not only brings a bunch of games back to our nowadays life but also opens up our vision and imagination for the future social life. When the team received the design commission, the challenge was extraordinary big. First of all, the game show must be playful and attractive visually and physically. In the time in which entertainment fills our daily life, however, the amusing staff is usually overwhelmed as the day to come. How to express or implement a very interesting game exhibition has become the most important point of the design.

When communicated with the British side about the concept and core content ahead of the exhibition, the architect found that pixel is an interesting theme. The exploitation of video games is inseparable from the emerging of the pixel. The incipient developed games were limited by hardware and software technology, and the game interfaces are usually presented in the evident pixel. Thus the architect extended such idea on graphics, façade of architecture and interior. The entire space looks like a huge pixel maze. Visitors can play in every interactive space like Mario jumping on the pixel boxes.

“We made a visual extension based on the information transmission. It’s very important to resonate with the feedback between the visitors and creators. And then the resonation became the key element of the design, just like the rest of art types in theatrical films”, the architect replied.

The organizer re-used staffs and properties from other allied exhibitions as far as possible. In the same time, the architect believes that most of the cubes in the space could be adaptively used in other activities, even in public spaces as decorating ornaments.

When the team was conceptually designing the project early time, in the time of ‘cyber celebrity,’ what is the optimal solution for GAME ON exhibition based on video games inspired idea, instead of chasing and catering to the online mass culture. But it can't be contrary to the essential purpose of the exhibition. Therefore, the team adopted the concept of pixels after deeply understanding the contents of GAMEON exhibition, and also introduced the color matching of the current network trends. The architect hopes to bring the exhibition to its potential market in a best and complete way that visitors would be interested in.