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Weddings, man. They take forever to plan, cost a lot of money, and the vast majority of them are about as exciting as a speed run of Myst. To top it off, brides and grooms rarely have similar ideas about the kind of event they’d like to throw so one of them just steamrolls the other with turquoise taffeta and heirloom lederhosen.
In a stunning twist of fate for which I will be forever grateful, my fiance Kellbot and I happened to share a great number of interests. We’re both web programmers by trade. We both went to school for art. We both love videogames. Most importantly, we both like making things.
Thanks to our common proclivities, it didn’t us long to settle on a graphic theme for our wedding: videogames! Specifically, videogames comprised of big blocky pixels. To uphold a base level of classiness, we shied away from themeing the event itself around any specific game ( despite how excellent a warp pipe centerpiece would be ) and instead focused on creating a feeling of general videogamey-ness for the blessed occasion.
Curved lines were made verboten! Smooth gradients were abolished! Anti-aliasing was turned off -- ENTIRELY. We needed to make every angle sharp and keep our color count to a bare minimum. These guidelines were easy enough to follow in the two dimensional world of stationary and websites, but it was a little trickier to translate such wanton blockiness into the third dimension. After some brainstorming, we decided that the closest thing to a real-world pixel is a Lego brick. We ordered a pile of Legos and got to work prototyping decorations.
Armed with ideas and raw ingredients, we spent the better part of a year geeking out over every geekable part of the wedding planning process. We used a wide variety of tools: a laser cutter, X-Acto knives, Photoshop, Blender, Python, PHP, and a mountain of support from family and friends. This was the start of us building our lives together, and we were going to start if off nerdy.
CONCLUSION
Amazingly, every piece of the plan came together beautifully and we had a blast. There were great games, delicious food, awesome music, and the best friends and family any couple could ever ask for. Despite being the sort of folks who had never in the past thought about the sort of wedding they’d want to have, we got pretty deeply invested in the process and had a lot of fun.
If I have any advice to give prospective nerdy couples, it would be to make your wedding your own: don’t be afraid to inject the things your love into your celebration. If you work towards making it the sort of event you’d genuinely have fun at, both you and your guests will have a much better time. Additionally: if you end up turning your reception into a LAN party, please invite us. |
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| 2024 Chris Maguire |
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