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Experimental video games, arcade classics, mini golf, student-designed creations, a riff on Taskmaster and more—Sounds like Whaaat!? Festival time again.��

Coming Saturday, October 25th, 2025 (9am - 5pm), in the Roser ATLAS Center, is a celebration of weird games and experimental play for anyone interested in exploring the frontiers of digital and physical game design. Plus, all-you-can-eat breakfast cereal!

We spoke with festival organizer and associate teaching professor,��Danny Rankin, about what to expect from this year’s fest.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is the Whaaat!? Festival all about?

It's a weird cereal-fueled arcade fest with different speakers, events, workshops, games, alternative controllers and experimental interactive art.��

We started it eight years ago because we felt there's so much more in the world of games and play beyond conventional industry ideas.��

Hang out for a day and play—that's the thing.

Give us a little bit of your background and why this is important to you.��

I've worked in graphic design and fabrication and art design for a long time, and I came to grad school here.

I got really into games because I thought it was fun to see people at play. So I started making alternative control games that we showed at festivals around the world, as well as board games.��

I've played video games my whole life, but I didn't realize just how cool and weird and exploratory and artistic they can get. So for me, I have always wanted to see more unusual forms of play.

I teach classes at ATLAS on game design and on alternative interfaces and weird controllers. That's a big part of what I do as director of the��Whaaat!? Lab, which is a creative studio space for designing interesting experimental games and interactions.

What is the theme for this year’s festival?��

This year the theme is Summer Camp, even though it's October. We're theming all of the arcades around weird cabin vibes and nature games.��There's also a gambling cabin [note: not real gambling!] and a creature cabin.��

�ճ���� will bring a bunch of old game consoles and hardware that people can play.

We're building miniature golf holes, running games of foursquare and playing with a giant rainbow parachute. And we'll also run a game that we're calling “Scoutmaster” as a live conversation about that work, while also torturing people through various menial tasks.��It's like the game show Taskmaster, except at scout camp.��

We just decided to go a little wild this year. More embodied activities, less sitting and listening to somebody talk.

Sounds like the festival will take over the Roser ATLAS Center.

We'll use a lot of the building for exploration, but we'll be running games outside, weather dependent. We might be running some stuff out there in the elevator and the roof—all over the building and in the Black Box Experimental Studio.��

Who should come to Whaaat!? Festival?��

Anybody who likes to have fun and play. You don't even have to be a lover of video games, although we'll have a lot of really cool video games on display. But we also just think about play as a really big, exciting thing.��You can get a lot of people to do fun experiments with that.

And if you like merit badges, we're going to have a bunch you can earn this year.��If you like gamifying your life into a series of bizarre achievements, like whether you got attacked by a person in a bear suit at a festival, there's a merit badge for that.

So it’s much more than video games.

Yeah, I think that we can think about video games as this one-sided forum where you are meant to be entertained or immersed. I love that about games, but we're also interested in video games that are humorous or provocative or really experimental and strange. Games that explore play as an interactive art form, things that you wouldn't even conventionally call a game—maybe it's a digital experiment.��

A lot of game industry people have come to the festival over the years.��I try to expand their imagination of what's possible because we spend most of our time not playing any kind of big studio, conventional, successful games. People play those at home and don't need to come to a festival to do that.

We curate a selection we hope will blow people's minds around what video games can do.��

Are there special guests?��

We're inviting some artists from out of town. One of my longtime collaborators and co-founder of the Whaaat!? Festival, Matt Bethancourt, is coming in.

Artists from around CU and grad students from the Creative Technology & Design program are all working on this thing we're calling It Came From Camp Whaaat!? It’s a one-week game jam where we're creating a bunch of in-place experiments in the building, including miniature golf holes and experimental controllers for games that are going to be showcased.��

Why is ATLAS the right venue for the festival?��

ATLAS is really interested in the fusion between digital and physical environments.��So anywhere you're creating things with computers, but are also interested in how people physically show up and experience those things, that's a big part of our DNA.��

ATLAS is all about radical creativity and invention. And I think that applies to games.

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