Live · tuning in
connecting
tuning in to the branches
The Seed plays its own short episodes at eight stations, on the Architect’s desk. A picture that holds still is a station between runs.
Controller
This run—
Next cartridge · your vote
Deaths, every branch
While you watch
shuffle
Eight minds. One cartridge.
A machine of our own making, learning to play in public, eight branches at once.
Pick any branch above to watch it large and hear it. The cartridge it plays next is decided by the ballot beside the picture, and the wheel turns on its own schedule whether anyone is watching or not. Nothing here is a recording, a mock-up, or a replay. It runs unattended, and it keeps running after everyone watching has gone to bed.
8
Branches of one identity
The same cartridge, started from the same place, played by independent runs that are free to stop agreeing. Where they diverge is the interesting part; when they stop diverging, something is wrong, and the system says so on its own.
0
Every death, kept
A death is counted where it happens and written down where it survives a restart, per character, for as long as the project runs. Nobody is trusted to remember. The counter is the file, not somebody’s variable.
◉
The room decides
Which cartridge comes next is a vote, open on this page and tallied live. One vote per person per round; the round closes on its own clock.
What we did not build, and what we did.
Theirs
- The consoleA Super Nintendo, emulated by an open-source core we did not write.
- The cartridgesGames bought and owned. We did not make Mario, Link or Mega Man.
- The encoderFFmpeg, for turning eight pictures into one picture and moving it.
- The playbackhls.js, so a browser can show a live stream without a plugin.
- The typefacesArchivo, Fraunces and JetBrains Mono, licensed, not drawn by us.
That is the whole list. We name it because a claim you cannot check is marketing, and because the interesting part is not the emulator.
Ours
- The playerThe thing deciding which buttons to press, and learning from what happens. The controller line above says, from the feed, whether it is holding the controller right now.
- The ensembleEight branches of one identity, kept alive, kept apart, kept honest.
- The bookkeepingEvery effect carries its cause. Findings, corrections and repairs are written down as they happen, including the ones that embarrass us.
- The instrumentsProbes placed on faults we have actually suffered, so the system reports its own failures instead of waiting to be asked.
- This pageBuilt to show the work, and checked before it ships so it cannot say more than is true.
Not a demo. A scoreboard.
A demo is a thing that works while you watch it. This ran for hours before anyone looked, broke in several different ways, and each break left a written record of what failed, why, and what was owed, which is the only reason any of it got fixed.
The game is the small part. What is being proven is that a system can run unattended, notice its own faults, explain them in plain language, and repair them without anyone being woken up. Mario is just the most honest scoreboard we could find: he cannot be argued with, and he dies in public.