Escape > Control > Play Sends Its Consoles Home With Winners
Drexel's Pearlstein Gallery becomes a playable lounge, with Derek Yu's fictional 1980s LX hardware rebuilt 10 times, a giant bowler hat controller and a queer games timeline.
- When
- On view through Sat., Dec. 12, 2026. Tue. to Fri., noon to 5 p.m.; Sat., noon to 6 p.m.
- Where
- Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, University City, Philadelphia.
- Admission
- Free.
The centerpiece of Escape > Control > Play: The Art of the Video Game, at Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, is a row of 10 game consoles that never existed. UFO 50, made by Derek Yu and the rest of the Mossmouth team, is a set of 50 games credited to UFO Soft, a fictional 1980s studio, and written for an invented console called the LX. Drexel engineering students fabricated 10 playable LX units for the show, each running the Nintendo Switch edition. "Part of the idea was the feeling of it being a mass-produced object," Christopher Grant, the games journalist who helped plan the gallery, told PhillyVoice. When the show closes Dec. 12, the visitors holding the high scores take the consoles home.
The opening of the UFO 50 gameplay trailer, shown silent. Courtesy Mossmouth.
The rest of the lounge, which the gallery runs through Dec. 12 with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, splits into three sections. Future Imaginaries gathers Hsin-Chien Huang's VR work Bodyless, drawn from the artist's memories of Taiwan's martial law period; Jeremy Couillard's open-world Escape from Lavender Island, after David Graeber's writing on debt; Lu Yang's game film Great Adventure of Material World; and The Alembic Hotel, an arcade game and installation by Oregon's .Compost Co-op. Collaboration > Community has Erin J.K. Truesdell's Haber Dasher, in which two players steer a giant bowler hat hung from the ceiling, plus Bennett Foddy and AP Thomson's Multibowl and Brian Gibson's Thumper and Thrasher.
Queer Games >> Histories + Futures, curated by Adrienne Shaw and Ari Gass, runs a three-decade timeline of LGBTQ+ games and includes Caper in the Castro (1989), C.M. Ralph's charityware detective game, which Shaw helped make playable again through emulation. Still ahead: Truesdell's alt-controller workshop on Nov. 13, a virtual worldbuilding conversation with Tabitha Nikolai, Couillard and Huang on Nov. 18, and a Dec. 4 community Q&A on queer games and platform censorship.
From left: Lu Yang's work in Future Imaginaries, the Trans Games Zine in Queer Games >> Histories + Futures, and UFO 50. Courtesy Drexel University and Mossmouth.
Killscreen goes looking for the galleries that let you pick up the controller instead of reading the wall text. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next.
