L' Avant Galerie presents Robbie BARRAT's new exhibition with a special focus on two of his latest works: Big Buck Hunter : Restoration and Counter-Strike : Afterstory.

Big Buck Hunter : Restoration
“Big Buck Hunter” is a hunting arcade game released in 2000. The player’s goal is shooting and killing bucks (male deer), while avoiding does (female deer, without antlers). The entire gameplay consists of shooting deer with a plastic gun attached to the arcade machine, across a fixed number of levels in a realistic (for the time) outdoor/forest setting.
For his work, “Big Buck Hunter: Restoration”, Robbie BARRAT reverse-engineered and modified the original game - radically reworking it with the goal of making it reflect the ‘Edenic’ state of the world before the fall, or the transfigured state of creation in the eschaton; free of violence or death. The key differences from the original game and “Big Buck Hunter: Restoration” include the arcade machine’s new ability to endlessly generate new landscapes, instead of a fixed amount of levels; to introduce a more ‘eternal’ component that replaces the linear time of the original game. The deer now exhibit restful and peaceful behaviors, and different animals who would never interact in the original game since they were confined to different levels, now exist in the same landscapes and can interact with one another, symbolizing the reunification of creation. It is not a subtractive act of just removing violence - every change is made to try and restore Big Buck Hunter to something like a pre-fall state, all of the modifications are achieved solely with the original game’s assets. New code is written, but no additional 3D models, textures, or audio assets are introduced—every texture, model, and sound present is painstakingly reverse engineered from the original game’s hard drive.

The work is presented as a modified “Big Buck Hunter” arcade cabinet.



Counter Strike : Afterstory
Counter-Strike - specifically Counter-Strike: Source, the version of the game from 2004 - has undergone an almost complete transformation over the past 20 years, through the rise of a community-made way of playing the game called “surf”.
Normally; Counter-Strike gameplay consists of a militaristic combat between two teams, the “Terrorists” and “Counter-Terrorists”, set in a realistic middle-eastern setting - it marks a departure from the more fantasy or sci-fi themed games from the 90’s.
Surf is a movement-based way of playing the game that emerged in 2004, that trades the normal combat-focused gameplay for high precision maneuvers, and changes the militaristic and ‘realistic’ middle-eastern setting of the game into a more abstract setting composed of ramps and slopes that players slide across to gain speed.
At the time of writing, the number of players playing Counter-Strike: Source in movement-based gamemodes exceeds the number of people playing it as it was intended; through surf - the game has gone from being a hyper-violent, hyper-realistic game to one that is played in a non-violent way, with players concentrating solely on their movements and speed.
The type of movement and precision achieved by “surfing” players is almost like dancing, most high level surfers have distinct styles of surfing. To a high extent; it can be a form of creative expression. Despite this almost complete transformation of the game; the characters, the terrorist and counter-terrorist, remain unchanged, although their actions and environment have been completely transformed.
The work presented in Counter-Strike: Afterstory consists of still images that attempt to reflect this transformation of the game through the characters, the terrorist and the counter-terrorist, who are no longer “Hostages of Military Fantasy”. This work draws from the visual language of “sprays”, images that players applied to the walls of the game-spaces in Counter-Strike using the game’s built in graffiti function - the work also follows “Velvet Strike”, a Counter-Strike mod that adds a collection of counter-military graffiti to the game; and intervention/protest recipes that took place in Counter-Strike in 2002 (by Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon) - linking Surf as the ultimate answer to what “Velvet Strike” was trying to accomplish.

Aspects of Counter-Strike culture and the Internet culture of the early 2000s are also explored through a generative piece that uses a vast archive of images used as “sprays” and applied by players to the walls inside Counter-Strike games between 2005 and 2020.