Long March: Restart

In 1993, Feng Mengbo created a series of paintings he titled Game Over: The Long March. Painted in the style of 8-bit video games like Mario and Mega Man, the paintings depicted 42 scenes, arranged in order to look like snapshots from a real side scrolling video game. Feng’s protagonist was a nameless Red Army soldier, depicted battling everything from ghosts and giant insects, to sumo wrestlers and astronauts.

AH_Q

Ah_Q.jpgChinese new media artist Feng Mengbo has worked with iconic first person shooters Doom and Quake throughout his career. In Q3 (1999) Feng recorded footage of the game Quake III Arena and superimposed live action video of himself, toting a camera around the battlefield and interviewing contestants, over top. Feng expanded upon this idea in 2002's Q4U (a play on the common abbreviation for the game, Q3A) by completely reworking the game's code to replace all character models with a model of himself, bespecktacled and shirtless, with a gun in one hand and a video camera in the other. Feng's AH-Q, released in 2004 and pictured here, saw the addition of a dance pad used to control all the player character's motions.

The following video, produced by the Creator's Project, includes examples of Feng Mengbo's work and an interview with the artist.

[video src= http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/creators/feng-mengbo]