On display at the National Videogame Arcade
2015 - 2018

"Dash & Bash has become one of the signature pieces of the National Videogame Arcade. It’s a brilliant, fun, intoxicating introduction to what we’re about and for most people it’s the first thing they play when they come in.

Lots of our visitors haven’t played a lot of games before and think they’re not for them. After five minutes on Dash & Bash, they're out of breath, laughing and suddenly awake to the possibilities of what videogames can be."

Iain Simons - CEO, The National Video Game Foundation

Dash & Bash was originally commissioned for GameCity Nottingham in 2014, where it was installed as a playable room within the venue.

An updated version was created for the National Videogame Arcade, and was one of the first installations in the museum when it opened in 2015.

Each player is given a picture card to find, which will appear on one of four wall-mounted screens. Players must dash to the screen with their card and bash the big button beneath it to score!

The game is designed to get players moving around each other as physical obstancles, and to find imaginitive ways to cheat by getting in each other's paths.

Tech Stack

Unity C#

The game is developed in Unity and programmed using C#.

Arduino C

The kit of five buttons - one on each screen, plus a red "start" button - was built from an Arduino wired up to four light-up buttons.

Spout2 API

The original commission was designed for a 360-degree wraparound screen, with cards swarming around the players. I integrated the Spout2 interface as a Unity Package in order to render the game feed to five projectors arranged in a ring. The wraparound screen was not available during the GameCity festival so I adapted it to render on four monitors instead.