Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice

In 2014, Killscreen's Michael Pedersen climbed into a refrigerator box in Dave Shuff's Brooklyn home and piloted a mech. The box was the Big Steel Battalion Box, a homemade cockpit for Steel Battalion, Capcom's 2002 Xbox game that shipped with a $200, 40-button controller. The house rule that night: skill was discouraged.

Twelve years later the box is on its second version and sits in the permanent collection of The MADE, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. In late September it took over a corner of Maker Faire Bay Area on Mare Island, where the editor in chief of Make gave it an Editor's Choice ribbon. Its lights, vibration and alarms still fire off the LED signals the Xbox sends to the controller. There is also a working landline.

What I love is how little of it is the game. Recruits first passed through a parody boot camp of stamps, initials and clipboard rules run by volunteers in jumpsuits, who got oddly invested. "That one was perfect! I've got this down!" one crew member told Shuff near the end of a shift.

Then a coach outside the box, on a military surplus headset, talked each pilot through the startup sequence. Shuff, who admits to never playing past level two, thinks of Steel Battalion as "a transcendent startup sequence" attached to a "middling tail of a game," and the coach is what makes that sequence work.

One nervous kid, headset on, asked the voice on the other end, "Will you leave? Are you going to be with me the whole time?" The coach promised to stay. "It really hit me the relief in that kid's voice," Shuff wrote to me.

That is a cooperative game built on trust, closer to Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes or Sleep No More than to a flight sim. Shuff credits the whole build to stone soup: make a rough version, and someone shows up with the piece that fixes it. "If I'd just asked around for help and not MADE anything, I'm pretty confident that wouldn't have happened."

Learn more at bsbb-mkii.com.