The first time we come across Atsushi Wada’s sit-up simulator My Exercise is in a video of a GDC gathering. In it, Hidden Folks creator Adriaan de Jongh grips a tablet, pressing the screen to make the cartoon protagonist haul his torso up and plant his face into the side of a dog. When he draws his finger away from the screen, the boy returns to the floor. Peering over de Jongh are any number of indie scene luminaries, all of whom are hooting uproariously. It’s an image that has stuck in our minds for years. We were delighted, then, to see My Exercise finally release this summer - but what really caught our eye was its publisher. Playables, co-founded by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach, has been on our radar for a little while: whenever we trip over unusual, and hilarious, games, we find it at the other end of the wire.
Their involvement with My Exercise was, Frei tells us, “kind of a funny coincidence”. The only DVD he’d ever bought of another animator’s work was Wada’s. “So I was a fan of his work, and then I happened to meet him for the first time in 2014 while doing a residency in Tokyo. That was when I started to become interested in interactive stuff.”
Interactive film Plug & Play was Frei’s way of making “an animation for the Internet. I talked to a lot of game designers, and they all wanted to make it an adventure game, and I didn’t like that.” Fortunately, he came across the work of game design graduate and freelance programmer von Rickenbach. “I liked that he seemed to have a different approach with every project team - and everything was original in some way. And I was super-surprised, because he seemed to know and like the same random stuff online that I do.” The toy games of Vectorpark, and Vincent Morisset’s “film for computer” BLA BLA, were early inspirations for what would become Playables. “We just started to meet more regularly and work on [Plug & Play],” Frei says. “Like, often, we would just sit down at a table in silence and think, and eat a lot of avocado sandwiches.” Von Rickenbach smiles: “We played ping pong… no, we really had to figure out how to work together also.”