Screentendo Might Lower Your Productivity

There is just something about this rotund plumber known as Mario who has captivated generations of gamers, first making it big in the highly pixelated era of video games, before moving on to greener pastures in 16-bit titles, and then there was the Nintendo 64 followed by the GameCube and Wii platforms, of course. Oh yeah, who could forget those adventures on Nintendo’s handheld platforms as well? It looks as though Screentendo wants to entice you with such sweet memories while you are at work, as this app will transform your screen into an old-school Mario level, now how about that?

Screentendo remains within the developmental stage as at press time though, and you would have to do your bit of heavy lifting if you would like it to get going on your machine. The brainchild of Aaron Randall, who started Screentendo as an experiment, shared, “The idea came from a conversation with a friend at work – he spends a bunch of his time staring at graphs which monitor our servers, and I joked with him that one day I’d build an app that he could overlay on those graphs to turn them into something more interesting to look at (while still maintaining their use as graphs). A few weeks later we had a hackday at the Songkick office where I work (a hackday is where everyone spends the day working on anything they like), and I cobbled something together that eventually became ‘Screentendo’.”

It will take time to load and an even longer period to process the image, where programming skills are required just to run the app, and Screentendo works on OS X exclusively at the moment. I wonder what the folks at Nintendo think about this…

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers, Gaming
Tags: app, Nintendo