Looking back at the history of 1378(km), it feels like an iterative stress test – not just for servers, but for me personally and for the medium of computer games itself. Almost one million downloads. Over 800 print articles and segments in more than 400 television stations worldwide. And all because of my mid-degree project in the Media Art program at HfG Karlsruhe.
It was an absolute rollercoaster ride that showed me the immense power interactive systems can unleash.
The Dark Weeks: "Revolting!" and Police Protection
I remember the autumn of 2010 vividly. My goal was to create an interactive serious game that would make recent German history tangible as a moral dilemma. The rule was simple: "who shoots, loses." Anyone in the simulation playing as an East German border guard who pulled the trigger was taken out of the game and put on trial.
But before the game was even out, the BILD newspaper ripped it out of context, framing it as a cynical "shooter". What followed was surreal: a nationwide media witch hunt, indictments for incitement, and very real death threats against me. We had to cancel the release on the Day of German Unity. When we finally released the game in December at HfG, we stood under police protection.
The Turning Point: Collapsing Servers and Late Justice
But then the dynamics flipped. At 23:00, the download went live – and the servers immediately collapsed under the massive worldwide rush. A few days later, the German Press Council officially admonished BILD for its false reporting. In January 2011, the public prosecutor dropped all investigations against me.
Suddenly, the world understood the actual intention. 1378(km) moved into global museums as an interactive artwork – from ZKM Karlsruhe to the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the MIT GameLab in the USA, and countless Goethe-Instituts worldwide. The absurd irony at the end: in 2013, of all publishers, Axel Springer (which owns BILD) honored the project as one of the best German computer games.
From the Source Engine to Adaptive AI
1378(km) was my first major proof of concept in media art. It proved to me that you can hack and repurpose existing systems to provoke deep, unpredictable human reactions. That very philosophy was the foundation for my PhD at RMIT Melbourne on "Hacking as a Playful Strategy".
Today, over a decade later, I no longer build Half-Life mods. But the core of my work remains the same. As a Creative Technologist, I develop interactive ecosystems, using local AI models and sensors to make spaces and hardware react. Bringing human and machine into a dynamic dialogue – that drives me today just as it did back then.
If you want to see how this journey from digital media art into today's physical, interactive world continued, you can find my current portfolio at elorx.com.