About Me

I'm John Huntington, author of Control Systems for Live Entertainment, the first book on show control and entertainment control systems. Through Zircon Designs, I do consulting and design work on entertainment control, show control, and audio systems, but this site contains many non-commercial resources related to entertainment, technology, and anything else I find interesting.

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Tuesday
17Nov2009

Rock-AFire Explosion

I had seen some of these Rock-afire videos, with a pretty sophisticated animatronic setup performing modern indie songs, like Arcade Fire:

NIN:

MGMT:

I knew these systems were made back in the 80's by Aaron Fechter of Creative Engineering, Inc.  However, thanks to an email from James Hergen, I found out that there is now a documentary, called The Rock-afire Explosion:

The story of Rock-afire is crazy, with a long history involving Showbiz Pizza Palace (additional link here), and its battle with Chuck E. Cheese's.  Rather than summarize it, you should click those links and read the craziness for yourself.  I just ordered the DVD of the movie.

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