Ice hockey fans who are also fans of Ice Hockey got an old-school surprise during the Stanley Cup finals earlier this month.
During an intermission, an animation driven by 12 different high-powered projectors made it look as if the classic Nintendo Entertainment System game Ice Hockey was playing out right on the real-life ice, in gargantuan size. This wasn’t even the first time that the Tampa Bay Lightning had debuted an 8-bit homage; in late May during the playoffs it had a similar video called “Bolts of Steel,” again a reference to the classic Konami game Blades of Steel.
Both of the crowd-pleasing moments were the brainchild of Scott Sleder, a 22-year-old motion graphics intern at Tampa Bay Sports & Entertainment, and a student at Sanford-Brown Chicago. He grew up in southwest Michigan as a Red Wings fan—and a Nintendo loyalist.
“[Blades of Steel] was the first hockey game that I had ever played,” he said. “I especially remember the fights [with] the announcer screaming, ‘Fight!’ and then being able to go at it.” Blades served as the venue for some “pretty heated” sibling rivalry between Sleder and his two older sisters, he said. “I just love the game. I thought it would be a neat thing to put on the ice–something different, something that I hadn’t seen before,” he says.
The face-off came complete with Blades of Steel’s vintage, tinny ‘FACE-OFF!’ vocal sample.
Played during a home game at the team’s Amalie Arena against the New York Rangers, “Bolts of Steel” began as so many NES games do, with a game selection screen, broadcast on the arena’s overhead screen, where an invisible “player” picked Tampa Bay to take on New York.
Chiptune music hit. On the ice below, a projection of a pixelated hockey rink pattern was laid over the real-life rink–a Blades-like goal matching the space of the actual goal, and so forth–and from one side, projections of 8-bit-style hockey players skated into the virtual rink for a quick game.
After winning the face-off, which came complete with Blades of Steel‘s vintage, tinny “FACE-OFF!” vocal sample over the speakers, the Lightning made a few passes and scored. The players celebrated by shaking from side to side. After trading some goals back and forth, Tampa Bay took back control of the puck and, as the Rangers’ goalie mysteriously flew off-screen, scored a second time to take the entire game. “LIGHTNING WIN!!!”
The entire show didn’t last more than a minute and a half, but it made for one of the niftiest, most inventive NES tributes you’ve ever seen.
“Out of the whole thing, I just wanted to get a good crowd reaction,” Sleder said. “We just wanted something that would get people ready for the second period—something new.”
3-D projection tech in sports might be young, but several NBA and NHL teams are already using it to kick up their pre- and mid-game presentations.
Beamed over rinks and courts in darkened arenas, these animations specialize in the trippy and thrilling. The Cleveland Cavaliers’ floor turns to Scrabble-shaped blocks and falls apart, experiences tremors coursing through it, and explodes into shards. The Montreal Canadiens’ rink falls to pieces in tune to dubstep before becoming a slate to glamorously showcase franchise highlights.
The Cavaliers’ projections are supplied by Quince Imaging, whose super-bright, 26,000-lumen projectors are rigged at varying angles and brightness levels, and beamed onto a flat surface. Tampa Bay has been working with a projection company called Dangers Inc.
Assembling ‘Bolts’ was a painstaking process that Sleder had only about four days to complete.
Dangers’ Pascal Barnes, who operates the projection system during Lightning events, internally floated around the idea of doing a projection based on an old videogame. Scott Sleder jumped on the concept and, largely working solo, turned it into “Bolts of Steel.”
Assembling “Bolts” was a painstaking process that Sleder had only about four days to complete in between his intern duties. Creating the package in Adobe After Effects, he pulled most of the menu designs from Konami’s original game, and recorded its sounds directly via an emulator. Blades of Steel‘s detailed-looking players weren’t properly visible on the ice, so Sleder had to design and animated his own athletes.
“Bolts of Steel” isn’t just a quirky demonstration of bleeding-edge technology being used to display vintage graphics. It’s also part of a trend of sports leagues and teams calling back to classic videogames to excite and entertain their grown-up fans.
In 2012, the NFL dedicated an entire short documentary to revisiting Tecmo Super Bowl, another fondly-remembered NES classic. Last March, the Houston Rockets debuted a highlights package styled after the popular arcade game NBA Jam, complete with snappy commentary from the game’s original announcer.
Time has been nothing but kind to soulful, primordial sports games like these. For adults currently between 20 and 40 years old who recognize them, they evoke rose-colored memories of youth, friendship, victory, and possibility. Really, there’s no reason to not reference them—especially when it comes to getting fans hyped for the next quarter.
By beating New York four games to three, Tampa Bay entered the Stanley Cup Finals to meet the Chicago Blackhawks, who they play again this Saturday. For the Lightning’s first home game against the Hawks, Sleder and the team’s motion graphics coordinator Josh Boyd developed another projection, this time even more of a throwback: a version of Ice Hockey, an NES hockey game even older than Blades of Steel.
“Maybe why people get a kick out of it,” he says, “is because they’re not expecting the technology to go backwards like that.”
