Sometime during September, a gallery took place that I admit I never heard of. The “Out of Controller” exhibition in Australia. Entries were designed to win prizes of cash and a chance to give a game idea to Nintendo Australia. The theme was basically the name of the exhibit, you can see all the lovely Nintendo characters outside the realm of their games.

Out of the first three places, only one was really good. I’m not going to say this deserved first place necessarily, but it is damn solid art. Maybe the problem with “Out of Controller” was that it is a competition rather than a gallery of good solid art. I just hope that isn’t what it takes to get people to come out to enjoy looking through a gallery, making a competition of it.. .*sigh*.. apologies for my digression.

Pauline and Donkey Kong by Edward Crosby, 2nd place (Check out a very cool post about the creation of this picture on his blog here)

Two other top prizes in other categories:

Donking Kong by Georgia Patton (Game Designers Prize)

Always Have, Always Will by Ellesse Duncan (Open Prize)

Below are what was in the rest of the gallery, a lot of these are definitely prize worthy, and honestly I feel all the artists here (including the above) should take their work over to the i am 8-bit shows where I believe it could be appreciated a bit more (or at least exposed to a larger audience).

Masquerade Ball by Jake Bamford

Mario pool party by David Caracciolo

Waiting, growing by Luke Watson

“being played” by Jay Chapman (Jay’s Blog)

“know him and you shall know fear” by Peader Thomas (Peader’s blog)

Wild piranha plant and Potted piranha plant disaster both by Greg Thornton (I pray this isn’t about him, but here is a Greg Thornton website)

Bandits by Andrew Kwa (Andrew’s blog)

Now that you have seen the above, look at the rest here. First prize was a FLASH CARTOON! Now this may be me sounding like some old man telling you to get off my lawn, but a flash cartoon using sprites already created in video games to do a Jerry Springer parody hardly qualifies as art. It is an amusing little flash toon mind you, and I do like it, but art… no no no. Other entries are either amusing or look as though a little kid drew them (which could honestly be the case).

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