Game On: Meet the Creators of That Amazing Pac-Man Totem at EDC Vegas

Totems are typically good for a quick laugh; that’s why we love them. At EDC Las Vegas 2016, however, Drew Banyai and Rebecca Miles’ creation went above and beyond the role of quickly passing entertainment, instead providing sustained, interactive and unforgettable moments for Headliners throughout the weekend.

The couple, both natives of Las Vegas, made, from scratch, a fully functional Pac-Man game totem featuring blinking lights, a working scoreboard, and levels to infinity. They affixed the contraption to the end of a pole and with it brought an extra dose of whimsy to the festival.

“There were a lot of people coming up to us like, ‘That’s awesome!’” Banyai says. “Then when I was like, ‘You wanna play?’ it was so great to see people’s realization that this was a fully functional game they could actually interact with.”

Banyai is well suited for the creative task. By day he works as a programmer, making video games played on phones and computers. He had been teaching Miles to use the microcontroller program Arduino, from which they forged the electronic core of their totem.

“Pac-Man is the perfect game for this medium,” Banyai says, “because it’s just in pixels and can be represented very simply. You can recognize it right away, even from far away.”

The homemade game took nine weeks to make and is made from 256 rows of neopixel strips that Banyai and Miles soldered together, along with a peg board purchased at Home Depot, cardboard, eight AA batteries, AC/DC converters, EL wire, a paintbrush handle and, Banyai jokes, “dreams and a lot of tape.” A cable connects the contraption to a joystick, which went into the hands of the roughly hundred Headliners who played the game throughout the weekend. Banyai says it took him and Miles 45 minutes just to walk from the shuttle to the festival entrance Friday night, because so many people wanted to play.

The game was, in fact, a hit even before it arrived at the Speedway. A few weeks before EDC, the couple posted a video of the totem on Reddit, where it got almost a hundred upvotes and a lot of enthusiastic attention from people impressed with their technical prowess. Once Banyai and Miles hit the festival, a lot of people in the crowd recognized them from the internet.

“There were so many times,” Banyai says, “where someone would yell across the festival, ‘I saw you on Reddit!’”

Through Reddit, the couple also became friendly with a group of Headliners who had made another Pac-Man–themed electronic totem called the PlurPac; they met up on-site at the Speedway. “There were all of these different ideas we had shared before the event,” Banyai says, “so to see each other’s totems in motion was great.”

Banyai says he chose Pac-Man specifically because of his fondness for retro arcade games—and because so many people have happy memories of playing Pac-Man as kids and were thus able to connect with their younger selves while playing with the totem.

“The whole idea of going to festivals and kind of leaving the outside world is that you get to be yourself and be with people who accept you no matter what,” Banyai says. “The memories of those carefree moments of being a kid playing in an arcade was another thing I was trying to represent with this totem.”

As their totem is quite heavy, the couple only brought it on Friday and Sunday, in order to give themselves a break on the second day. They had people lined up to play each day, and even those who missed them will be given the opportunity to use the game this September at Nocturnal Wonderland, where Banyai and Miles will be back to provide more offstage entertainment.

“As Pasquale says,” Miles notes, “we are the Headliners. So why not put on a show ourselves?”