The Pitch

In September 2025 a main promotor pulled their event at The Pitt in Granton, so our neighbours came to us with an offer we couldn’t refuse: would we like to design and produce an interactive experience in their main venue over Halloween? The space would be free to use, and The Pitt would handle ticketing and promo, but there was no budget for equipment or production. 

In other words, we’d have one month to create a customer-facing interactive show, from nothing. The sane response would have been ‘thanks but no thanks’, but we’d been itching to try out some of our experiments on a motivated audience, and we happened to have some unallocated hours coming up, so instead – perhaps foolishly – we said, ‘thanks but yes please.’

What Have We Got?

How do you fill a vast warehouse with enough light, sound and fun to keep punters of all ages engaged for a full hour, without spending money? First, a quick inventory of our own relevant equipment.

• Small-form PCs x 4
• Phone-based interactive prototypes x 2
• Giant interactive playable sculpture x 1
• Home-made video game housing x 1
• Assorted DMX lighting fixtures x 10 (ish)
• Huge but rock-solid gaming “laptop” x 1
• Sinden Light Guns x 2
• Custom-built LED panels x 2
• Camo netting x lots
• PA systems x 2

A decent start, but nowhere near enough. We’d have to fall on the mercy of friends/colleagues/legends to round out our kit…

The Kindness of Mates

We’re lucky to be surrounded by pals in related fields who are generous, resourceful and (most importantly) up for off-the-wall ideas. We put the call out, and soon we had extra lighting thanks to Chris from BLV, a massive sound system from DJ Paul, a genuine Indian tuk-tuk from The Pitt themselves, and the psychedelic Neon Gallopers from Ballyhoo Productions… after all, what self-respecting experience is without life-size illuminated fairground horses? All these folk gave not just their gear but their time, for which we are extremely grateful.

The Birth of Yar

One of our axioms is that everything we do must tell a story. We wanted to contextualise the experience so that it was more than just a bunch of installs dotted around a drafty warehouse. 

Brendan (Ray Interactive’s creative director) had recently acquired some Sinden Light Guns, and was “doing research” on emulated first-person-shooter games like Jurassic Park Arcade and House of the Dead. The latter was a simple but atmospheric zombie shooter that developed a devoted cult following after its release in 1997. 

A narrative began to crystallise in Brendan’s mind. What if the venue was a portal to a dimension where a scary creature called Yar dwelled; what if the portal only opened when the veil between worlds was thinnest; and what if Yar fed on the joy of mortals experiencing the games and activities? The premise would contextualise the installations and add some urgency and time-sensitivity to the mix: have fun, but not too much fun lest Yar attain enough power to break through, and make sure to cast him back to his diabolical realm at the end of each hour. 

And lo, Playhouse of the Dead was born and a structure for the hourly slots arrived at: a druidic monk would introduce the audience to the backstory, and the interactive portion would be bookended by multimedia ‘cut scenes’ featuring Yar himself projected onto the venue walls. At the beginning Yar ‘possesses’ the installations before handing control back to the punters; at the end the monk and the punters close the portal in the nick of time, just before Yar gains enough power to step across the realms.

So far, so ambitious. Who would play the monk? How could the pre-rendered content be synchronised with the lighting, our own installs, and the arcade game emulators?

Brendan Acts Up, Sounds Get Deep

If you want something done well (and for free), do it yourself. That extends to portraying monks in secret world-defending orders, and to voice-acting Yar, the entity that imperils the world in the first place. But even our Brendan’s rich baritone wasn’t quite deep enough, so we used the Dehumaniser plugin from our friends at Krotos Audio to push it even farther underground.

The graphics and dialogue were now ready to go, but the scenes still lacked music and sound design. By a spooooky coincidence, we were contacted around this time by Edinburgh-based sound designer Fred Yuan Feng. He had seen and liked our stuff, and was wondering if there were any collaboration opportunities coming up. We summarised what we needed, Fred said ‘thanks but yes please’, and within days he and his colleague Astrud Espinoza at Wavegrinder Audio had cooked up sound design and original music for the intro and outro animations.

Phones That Make You Look Up, Not Down

Playhouse of the Dead also gave us the opportunity to test two new phone-interaction prototypes in front of real audiences.

The first, a headphone experience called Sonic Brew, lets up to four users collaboratively create a meditative electronic soundscape and lightshow. Three of the interfaces are step sequencers (simple grids that make beat creation easy even for non-musicians), one is a sampler and one a theremin-style synthesiser driven by the orientation of the phone in the user’s hands. 

The second, Polypong, is a wireless multiplayer remix of Pong (arguably the first ever video game, created in 1972) in which up to four players control paddles and apply a surprising variety of strategies to batting balls away more effectively than their opponents.

Both use our IMP (Interactive Mobile Participation) cloud-based middleware that lets phones interact instantly with physical stuff, no download or app required. And both express our belief that smartphones can unlock shared, real-world, collaborative moments just as easily as they can silo us into doomscrolling solitude.

Adding these to our repertoire of arcade machines and hybrid installs meant we finally had the ingredients for a show.

Now it was time for Sam (Ray’s technical director) to hook everything up.

A Great Networking Opportunity

The story called for Yar to ‘seize control’ of parts of the room at precise times in the introductory animation. This meant not only triggering lighting changes, but also blanking/unblanking the video and muting/unmuting the sound from individual installs. 

Our go-to multimedia framework, Touch Designer, gave Sam the components he needed to sync up the DMX lighting network, and a few tweaks had our own installs obeying network commands too. But getting the arcade game emulators to behave proved much trickier.

Arcade emulators are generally built (with love) by hobbyists wanting to port retro gaming platforms like the Sega Mega Drive and coin-op classics like Street Fighter to modern hardware. In theory, modern hardware is more than up to the task. In practice, the emulators crash a lot. Especially when connected to the Sinden Light Gun, a fun but flaky controller that mimics a mouse not wisely but too well: it can accidentally give the user control of things they shouldn’t have control of. 

Sam (at the behest of the evil entity Yar) needed a way of remotely disabling/enabling the light guns, muting/unmuting the audio and hiding/revealing the video on the arcade emulator machines. 

True to its reputation as the Swiss army knife of languages, Python provided the answer. The pynput library let us remotely block and reinstate mouse and keyboard input, while pycaw’s audio utilities gave us process-level programmatic control of sound: we could remotely mute a game, for example, while Ableton Live continues to output audio on the same machine.

The room was connected; the show was ready to roll.

It’s Alive!

We ran Playhouse of the Dead in back-to-back hourlong slots across three days. The first half of each day was PG-rated and child-friendly, the second half for adult audiences and with gorier games. 

Reactions were positive. We were particularly encouraged by the popularity of our custom-made installs, which held their own against the more elaborate, high-budget games. Families got a kick out of the set pieces and the variety of activities on offer, from the ultra-analogue (a cornhole game made from beanbags and planks) to the fully-digital (Polypong, Jurassic Park Arcade). 

Our favourite moments: groups of friends totally engrossed in their beat creation in Sonic Brew; grandparents gleefully mowing down zombies with a light gun; kids constructing their own mini-rave on the Giant 303; overhearing a son tell his father he “didn’t want it to end” on their way out.

Learnings and Earnings

Sales were modest, as was expected with such a limited promo window, but the show impressed The Pitt enough for them to order a three-week reprise next Halloween. We’re classifying that as a success.

We’re proud of what we achieved on such a short timescale and with minimal budget. We took a risk on using the venue’s existing Wi-Fi network to connect everything, which just about worked. Next time we’ll use a dedicated, sandboxed router and only connect the master machine to the wider Internet. The fewer devices feverishly phoning home and wondering whether now is a good time to perform a mandatory update (spoiler alert: it’s not), the better.

Touch Designer’s purpose-built TD In/Out networking operators are… not great. Though they now use TCP/IP, their behaviour is more UDP-like: they don’t really handle packet acknowledgement, and certainly don’t report dropped packets. They’re more suited to streaming media, where the odd dropped frame or sample isn’t the end of the world, than to a networked control system where a missed event is the end of the world. Next time, we’ll build our own local Websockets-based system that manages dropouts and error recovery better.