A 9-foot-tall (2.7-meter-tall) video game joystick composed of wood, rubber, and steel has been recognized as the world’s tallest by Guinness World Records 2022.
In 2006, Dartmouth College professor Mary Flanagan designed the massive controller, which is roughly 14 times the size of a typical Atari controller, to commemorate her childhood memories of “maniacally” playing Atari 2600 video games.
She also wanted to investigate what happens when a single-player game becomes a multiplayer game: Playing early Atari games like “Centipede” and “Breakout” need at least two persons to control the joystick and hit the button.
According to Flanagan, an artist who is chair of Dartmouth’s Film and Media Studies and the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, “To have this common pop culture artifact just erupt in the middle of a space and allow people to play something familiar, yet not familiar, was exciting.”
The joystick is currently part of the permanent collection of the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, after touring Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
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