For Frank Lee, the pressure to achieve perfection has never been heavier. Normally, the Drexel University computer scientist only needs to impress students and peers. But this week, his work will be displayed on the side of a 29-story skyscraper. When you’re building the world’s largest video game, the experience needs to be bulletproof.
Lee, the cofounder of Drexel’s Game Design Program, first had the idea when he was driving past the Philadelphia skyline one day in 2008. The newly erected Cira Center building was wide enough that it could be used as a gigantic display for a video game that would be visible from miles away. Even better, the all-glass exterior of the building was already affixed with an LED lighting system that could display simple graphics.
Hacking A Building
After a few years of trying, Lee finally got permission from the building’s owner to test the lights. He and his small team of engineers went to the Cira Center and fired up WireShark to analyze the network traffic coming in and out of the computer controlling the building’s lighting system.
“We were seeing packets going back and forth and we realized that the lights were on their own little private IP address,” Lee says. “At that point, I knew it was theoretically possible. As long as we knew what that command was, the packets were being sent and we could control the lights. If you can control the pixels, you can create a game.”
With that, Lee and his colleagues set out to code an enormous version of Pong that would be playable from a half mile away, on the south terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just across the Schuylkill River. The game’s simplistic nature would lend itself well to the Cira Center’s low-resolution graphics capabilities, as well as to the fact that they now had a hard deadline. That’s because the public unveiling of the game was set to kick off Philly Tech Week, an annual series of events that takes place across the city in late April.
With mere weeks to complete the project, Lee’s team hunkered down in a small room on the first floor of the building that houses Drexel’s Computer Science department and started coding.
Marc Barrowclift, a Drexel software engineering student working with Lee, was busily plugging away at Python scripts one afternoon when he hit the jackpot. As it turned out, a developer named Giles Hall had already done much of the coding necessary to take control of the Philips Color Kinetics LED lighting system, which happened to adorn the Cira Center. Barrowclift grabbed the 100-line code library from GitHub and started building on top of it.
