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Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)

52 points · 28 comments · peter_d_sherman

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krapp · 1790736562 · focus · HN ↗
Oh shit, actual human talent!
1. raldi · 1790738709 · focus · HN ↗
  These are the original illustrations with just the text changed.
  1. krapp · 1790738910 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes and nowadays no one would even bother put in that much effort. They would have an AI generate the box art and the jokes. The jokes wouldn't even be funny, but no one would care because "human jokes aren't usually funny."
    Apocryphon · 1790740806 · focus · HN ↗
    tbh, there is some novelty when AI first imitates a distinct human style. And then it gets old immediately after not unlike when VC Twitter discovered AI could imitate Studio Ghibli art.
    krapp · 1790742539 · focus · HN ↗
    I've said more than once that no matter how much Ghibli stuff you train an AI on, it's never going to spontaneously come up with a Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. People don't realize there's an aspect to creativity that dwells within the human brain and the morass of personal visceral human experience that can't be reconstructed and simulated from expression alone - it's a lossy process. And there's more to it than mere randomness and novelty.
    That's why no matter how good AI gets, it's only ever as good as the human effort put into it. It's very good at being very technically mediocre.
    RugnirViking · 1790775938 · focus · HN ↗
    > People don't realize there's an aspect to creativity that dwells within the human brain and the morass of personal visceral human experience that can't be reconstructed
    Your point here seems to be based more on faith than anything concrete. It is a sibling with the idea humans have "immortal souls" and the like - something we would like to be true more than anything that actually is.
    This being said, I do think AI systems are very bad at creativity. But I don't think that it's impossible that they could be, nor do I have any idea why, specifically, they are bad at creativity. At this point in interpretability research, anyone telling you they do know is lying.
    krapp · 1790781100 · focus · HN ↗
    >Your point here seems to be based more on faith than anything concrete. It is a sibling with the idea humans have "immortal souls" and the like - something we would like to be true more than anything that actually is.
    No, I'm not invoking the concept of an immortal soul, and it's incredibly frustrating that this is the go-to assumption anyone makes when criticism of AI's creative capabilities.
    It's entirely possible to be a pure physicalist while also believing AIs aren't capable of creativity because they aren't capable of being human, and don't have the necessary human experience to inform the processes they simulate, because creativity is fundamentally a means of human communication. That isn't actually an argument from the supernatural, and unless you believe it's possible to derive a brain simulation of Hayao Miyazaki complete with his lived experiences and memories simply by studying the specific technical aspects of his animation style in aggregate, then I think the why of AI's limitations in this regard should be obvious.
    jhbadger · 1790843231 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem is that they used to say that about chess. In the 1980s it was thought that grandmaster-level chess wasn't just algorithically looking at the board and computing scores for moves as chess programs did but something that required the intuitive powers of the human mind. After all, it's clear that Kasparov wasn't computing the scores of millions of possible moves across future board states in his head but simply "saw" the right one to take by a process he couldn't explain. And yet he was eventually beaten by a machine - not even one using a clever algorithm - just a machine that did pretty much what any stupid chess program did but faster. It turned out that human "intuition" wasn't needed.
    cubefox · 1790744199 · focus · HN ↗
    Exception: Gwern's AI-assisted cartoons include some funny ones. <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/comics/index" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/humor/comics/index (scroll down)
    Lerc · 1790745365 · focus · HN ↗
    It depends on what the joke is. I can see people making an image for a joke that they already have in their head. Or they can AI generate an image and think up with a caption to make whatever it generated is funny (partially clips does exactly this with clipart). Sometimes it can be completely AI generated because the humour comes from seeing how the model misconstrued what it was supposed to do. A lot of these require humans to do the work of curation.
    I'd be kind of tempted to give these box art images to an AI and ask it to make the game. I suspect there would be much amusement to be had in seeing how they do at a cursed task like that.
    kraquepype · 1790745622 · focus · HN ↗
    I wish we were still in the "haha funny" era of AI, and we could laugh at the absurdity it came up with. Fun times.
    One of my favorites: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/i3kr2z/humor_someone_forced_a_bot_to_watch_over_1000/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/comments/i3kr2z/humor_...
    WithinReason · 1790751973 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Cpoll · 1790760812 · focus · HN ↗
    Can confirm. I'm pretty sure it's Keaton Patti's writing, "forced a bot to watch 1000 hours of..." is his shtick. It's all hand written to read like an exaggerated, comedic Markov chain output.
sublinear · 1790740303 · focus · HN ↗
For something from 2008, this holds up pretty well. The years blend together and I read them in my head in Mr. Plinkett's voice.
Triphibian · 1790740454 · focus · HN ↗
This feels like stolen Worth1000 content.
1. qingcharles · 1790747115 · focus · HN ↗
  Or b3ta.
2. bazzargh · 1790796660 · focus · HN ↗
  that's more than a little unfair - MGK was famous for making this stuff back then, and was the person people would steal these memes _from_.
gorgoiler · 1790740516 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. JdeBP · 1790779693 · focus · HN ↗
  It's Breakout and Super Breakout according to a list that gives the real titles in the comments section.
adzm · 1790741043 · focus · HN ↗
See also paperback paradise which did sci-fi book cover parodies <a href="https://paperbackparadise.bigcartel.com/category/prints" rel="nofollow">https://paperbackparadise.bigcartel.com/category/prints you can see the Instagram and x links at the bottom too
1. NetMageSCW · 1790744455 · focus · HN ↗
  I guess they were all written by teenagers.
  1. smcin · 1790753489 · focus · HN ↗
    "Found a Way to Date my Cat" seems to predict romantasy...
Panzerschrek · 1790742316 · focus · HN ↗
Was it allowed to use such cover art having nothing to do with in-game (pretty-limited) graphics?
1. krapp · 1790742517 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes. And it's actually part of the reason the video game market crashed in the 80s, because of how misleading the artwork was.
  This is why the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges.
  1. musicale · 1790744213 · focus · HN ↗
    > the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges
    This is why the ESRB was created.
    mikestew · 1790780008 · focus · HN ↗
    All those titties on the Nintendo cartridge box put U. S. Congress into a tizzie, I’m sure.
  2. Lerc · 1790744522 · focus · HN ↗
    It's strange, I learned Forth on the Atari and found that the cover was a surprisingly accurate depiction of how I turned out.
  3. vunderba · 1790745312 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah I think the first-party early titles (Excitebike, etc) were definitely more representative of the game play.
    But third parties definitely didn't respect this. I'm sure everyone who grew up in this era remembers the infamous Megaman cart by Capcom [1].
    One of the things that Nintendo learned from Atari was that massive amounts of shovelware did not help their cause.
    As a third party company, you were actually limited to a certain number of games you were allowed to release per year in North America (five I believe). There were ways around that, like Konami forming the subsidiary Ultra.
    Additionally they locked the system behind the 10NES chip that made unauthorized game production difficult (unless you pulled the classic Taiwan voltage snap trick or just blatantly copied the source from the US Copyright Office like Tengen).
    [1] - <a href="https://imgur.com/a/5hUUDnM" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/5hUUDnM
  4. LocalH · 1790871520 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
vunderba · 1790745695 · focus · HN ↗
These are great.
Salvador Dalí’s Pinball Thrills could also have been the title of the pinball segment on Sesame Street back in the day.
Every sport ever in pong form was completely true. Magnavox Odyssey Pong + a crappy blue cellophane transparency overlay == ice hockey!.
Anyone remember Slalom for the NES?
<a href="https://imgpb.com/hvszd" rel="nofollow">https://imgpb.com/hvszd
lelanthran · 1790745885 · focus · HN ↗
Not so different from the usborne series of game books.
Imagination had to work hard, back then, to see the game in the characters on screen.
smcin · 1790753554 · focus · HN ↗
"Buzz Aldrin’s Space Rainbow Tennis" just needs a four-fingered sentient alien opponent. The great man would have approved...
tobadzistsini · 1790799575 · focus · HN ↗
That's a pisser. Thank you xoxo

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