Red Bull Just Put a Playable Tetris Game on a Magazine Cover - Yanko Design

"The GamePop GP-1 Playable Magazine System is exactly what it sounds like. It is the cover of Red Bull's GamePop magazine, a publication dedicated to gaming culture, except this one comes with 180 RGB LEDs, seven capacitive touch buttons, a 32-bit ARM chip, and a flexible circuit board thinner than the width of a human hair."

"Bates sandwiched a custom flexible circuit board between layers of paper to create a cover that measures about five millimeters at its thickest point. That thickness? That is where four rechargeable coin-cell batteries live. The whole thing bends. It feels like a magazine. And yet it runs Tetris."

"What I find genuinely impressive here is not the novelty, though the novelty is undeniable. It is the level of restraint in the engineering. The LED matrix is just 180 lights, two millimeters each, arranged to render the falling Tetris blocks cleanly enough that the game is actually playable."

Red Bull created an innovative magazine cover called the GamePop GP-1 Playable Magazine System that challenges the narrative of print's decline. Designed by Kevin Bates, the engineer behind the Arduboy gaming console, the cover features 180 RGB LEDs, seven capacitive touch buttons, a 32-bit ARM chip, and a flexible circuit board measuring only a tenth of a millimeter thick. The entire system, including four rechargeable coin-cell batteries, measures approximately five millimeters at its thickest point and maintains the tactile feel of traditional magazine paper. The design prioritizes engineering restraint, with every component carefully integrated to make technology seamlessly disappear into the paper while delivering a fully playable Tetris game with approximately two hours of battery life per charge.

Read at Yanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News