Ryan Presley's Inferno
Ryan Presley · 2025
A video game artwork by Ryan Presley, built with Stripy Sock and first commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. Every sprite is drawn by hand and the score composed in-house, played on purpose-built arcade cabinets that tour art fairs around the country.
Inferno looks like an arcade game because it is one — a cabinet, a stick, a screen you stand in front of with someone waiting for their turn. It is also an artwork by Ryan Presley, in which players disrupt mining helicopters and liberate water supplies across a speculative Central Australian landscape shaped by colonial extraction. Ryan makes the work. We build it with him.
What it is
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A real arcade, not a screenshot of one
Purpose-built cabinets driven by an iPad, using external display support and hardware game controllers so the whole thing feels the way an arcade machine should.
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Drawn and scored by hand
Every sprite painted pixel by pixel from Ryan's source material, and an original soundtrack composed to match.
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On tour
Shown at major art fairs around Australia, including the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, where the cabinets travel with the work.
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Still growing
We continue to build Inferno with Ryan, deepening the world and adding platforms — most recently Apple TV.
Behind the game
It began as an installation for the National Portrait Gallery, and the brief carried a hardware problem: it had to feel like an arcade machine, not like an iPad in a box. So the cabinets are exactly that — cabinets. An iPad drives them through iPadOS’s external display support, with real arcade hardware wired in as game controllers, and control handling written specifically for that setup rather than adapted from touch. Players never meet the iPad. They meet a stick and a screen, which is the point.
The game itself is native Swift, built on SpriteKit and SceneKit. The part we are most attached to is the least automatable: every sprite in Inferno was drawn by hand, pixel by pixel, working from Ryan’s source material, and the soundtrack was composed in-house to sit with it. Pixel art is unforgiving that way — there is nowhere for a shortcut to hide, and translating a painter’s work into a few hundred deliberate pixels is its own kind of craft.
What was made for one gallery has kept going. We have continued developing Inferno with Ryan ever since, expanding the world and its complexity, and adding tvOS so it can run on an Apple TV as well as in a cabinet. It travels: the work has been shown at major art fairs around Australia, most recently at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, where a queue in front of a cabinet turns out to be a fairly good measure of an artwork.