David Hindman has created a new way to play videogames. They use their (real) guitars to control the fighters from Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart as if the guitars were actual buttoned controllers. Modal Kombat (the mod of Mortal Kombat), is controlled by different pitches, volumes and their sequences that tell the fighter what to do:
The result, Modal Kombat, is a modern-day "dueling banjos". It has raised the bar for performers, composers, interface designers, and competitive gamers. Modal Kombat delivers an engaging combination of music, choreography and good old-fashioned fantasy street fighting.
I'm not too keen on how a guitar actually works, but David had very informative interview with UrbanGuitar a couple years back giving a detailed explanation on how the guitar controls the fighters. David talks about some of his other experiments such as playing Rampage using a keyboard and trumpet (among other instruments). The interview also goes into what could happen in the future such as a band playing together to play a game of GoldenEye or Doom.
If this has perked your interest, David and his partner, Evan Drummond, play lives shows in the New York area. The next show is February third. Until then, check out ModalKombat's Web site for more details and hit the jump for another video called Guitarkart.
Now if they only would play the actual songs from the games to control the characters ...
"I'm not too keen on how a guitar actually works,"
Well CTZ, you see, you put your left hand on the top part of the strings in different places, then you strum the bottom part of one or multiple strings with your right hand near the bottom of your guitar. :)
Academically, this is actually really cool. I could imagine somebody getting a Master's degree in music theory and/or game theory with this as his thesis.
I play guitar and honestly----if i didnt play video games i would be worth a damn on guitar. How the hell you transform pitch into a coomand? I would've done mass effect with muse. Try it.
It looks pretty cool, but certainly needs more work to be done it. It looked like they had a hard time trying to do some smooth moves on the game through their guitars.
Man, I bet it's hard thinking of the notes as commands. So much is automatic when playing guitar, depending on what i'm playing, my fingers will automatically move into the next position. Breaking out of that must be hard.
Unless, I bet you could come up with different combos that would essentially be different melodies when playing with a guitar... Dex is right. There could be alot to explore with an idea like this.
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1:38 AM on 12.03.2007 
also, 0th!