Event

Modal Kombat

Modal Kombat

Guitar Hero Is Dead: Guitarists Use Real Guitars to Control Video Games in a hybrid concert / public video game battle

Forget about using a plastic guitar to mimic your favorite band. What if you could use a real guitar just like any other video game joystick -- and thrash your opponent while you create original music?

Two classically-trained New York City guitarists calling themselves "Modal Kombat" have hacked into classic video games Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart. On March 30 at The Climate Theater in San Francisco, they'll make their characters move -- and battle against each other -- with a flurry of guitar-plucking.

The event, part of Modal Kombat's "Guitar Hero is Dead" Tour, is a video-game battle/performance-art hybrid that's open to the public. The goal is to demonstrate that real guitars -- or other musical instruments -- can be viable video game controllers.

About Modal Kombat:
Modal Kombat is a NYC-based performance group consisting of Yale School of Music alumni David Hindman and Evan Drummond. For the past five years, they've performed public guitar-controlled video game battles at various venues in Europe, New York City, and around the U.S.

Before the game Guitar Hero was released, Hindman was an NYU grad student, developing hardware and software that allowed real musical instruments to control various types of existing console video games. In 2004, he created the system that became the basis for Modal Kombat shows. At each show, various musical pitches, volume levels, and other musical parameters are programmed to trigger each character's movement, such as Left, Right, Punch or Jump.

www.modalkombat.com