Submarine Channel

Visual artist Marcel van Eeden (website | blog | wiki) and Submarine‘s game developer Jorrit de Vries created a short third-person experimental 3D game, or “author game,” that challenges preconceived notions of the traditional game avatar. In Sollmann (Part 1: The Harbour), the main character is poisoned at the start of the game and gradually loses his ability to see, hear and move.

Set in a 1940′s WWII harbour setting, the game’s narrative, its main characters and the most significant objects, such as the ship the Cornelia Maersk, were adapted from previous projects by van Eeden, thus tying in the game with Van Eeden’s larger body of work. Van Eeden’s analogue pencil drawings have been painstakingly translated to a 3D game environment by De Vries.

Stills from the making of Sollmann

A Split Second
Sollmann (Part 1: The Harbour) is one of three short video games developed as part of the video game research project A Split Second – a collaboration between Submarine Channel and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Our aim with A Split Second was to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations between visual artists and game designers, and to explore the concept of artistic authorship within the context of video games. Three unique short games are the tangible end result of A Split Second.

Credits
Artwork: Marcel van Eeden
Game developer: Jorrit de Vries
Sound design: Raoul Matheron

The video game projects produced by Submarine Channel and Stedelijk Museum were made with the support of the Dutch Game Fund and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, SNS REAAL, VSB Fund and Submarine Channel.