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Zack Kotzer

  • Founding Editor, Funland Zine
  • Contributor, Freelance
Toronto
As seen in: Apple Podcasts, Medium, The Atlantic, Kotaku, Motherboard, The Globe and Mail, VICE, VICE UK, Flipboard, Polygon and
Covers:  technology, video games, pinball, food, doom metal, comics, fashion trends at disneyland tokyo, arcades, VR
@FUNLANDmag guy / @kotaku weekends / pinball dummy / former carny
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Kyle Reimergartin is still hungry

Kyle Reimergartin is still hungry

Kill Screen — It didn't take long for pizza to come up. Apparently I had caught Kyle Reimergartin, a Seattle-based game maker, in the middle of packing leftover slices, though the way he said it had me thinking he was stashing away pizza in bags like a squirrel clawing dirt in the autumn. "Not like into a backpack or anything," says Reimergartin, "I'm not a monster. I do like to compress pizza into a perfect sphere when I'm done with it, like later you have a rice ball but it's pizza. I was in the process of doing that."
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You Can Never Go PlayStation Home Again

You Can Never Go PlayStation Home Again

Vice — A woman in a bikini ran towards me, stopped, stood pensively for a few moments, and began to fart. I didn’t know you could fart in Home, but she bent over, cocked her butt my way and ripped out nearly a dozen differently sized clouds of green vapour before scampering off and vanishing. In one room I stumbled into a small conversation about foot fetishes, two avatars reminiscing about the last time they jacked off on their respective partner’s toes.
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Mental Illness, the Video Game

Mental Illness, the Video Game

The Atlantic — Kara Stone has recently taken up gardening. Her floral dependents-Echinacea, sage, and geranium-have only yet grown into big sprouts, but she finds the activity a nice change from time spent in front of glowing screens. It's worth noting Stone recently put in a lot of that kind of time while creating her first video game, MedicationMeditation . It's also worth noting that she's planted these seeds in discarded antidepressant bottles. MORE FROM KILL SCREEN "When I was making MedicationMeditation," she says, "it had all of these ideas of focusing in on your body, but I was sitting there zoning out in front of a computer, snapping back into reality five hours later, shoulders up to my ears, dying for a cigarette.
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What will the future of VR be? Ask David Cronenberg.

What will the future of VR be? Ask David Cronenberg.

Kill Screen — This article originally appeared in our virtual reality issue. You can order a copy here. The room was cast in a dark blue glow, star-lit by glass reflections and other strange colours. Squint and it looks like the ' 80s nouveau glass-walled apartment of one Max Renn, but we'll get back to him later. Sounds are muffled in a sleepy space, with shelves of dangling specimen jars-some empty, others two-thirds full of some fluid-each soaking a POD. The Personal On Demand (POD), a palm-sized, fleshy, 3D-printed pronged critter, looks like a Pokémon spattered with various genitalia.
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The Stinking Beauty of Barfcade, a Refreshing New Game Fest

The Stinking Beauty of Barfcade, a Refreshing New Game Fest

Vice — I thought I saw one of the contestants vomit, but as Wiley Wiggins explained to me, she was just spitting up the anchovy ice cream into a garbage bin. Now, before you start thinking the Barfcade game jam was a bust, you should know that soon after the ceremonies ended, both contestants, Alexander and Jessica, rushed off-camera to the washrooms to blow chunks. "I'm not sure what did it," said Wiggins, "I think eating a whole stick of butter. I'm from the South, so that seemed like an easy enough challenge.
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Survival of the Dead: DayZ's Dean Hall Refuses to Go Easy

Survival of the Dead: DayZ's Dean Hall Refuses to Go Easy

Dork Shelf — Dean Hall has only killed once in his own video game. The world of , a multiplayer zombie apocalypse survival mod for Bohemia Interactive's military sim ARMA II, is cutthroat. Stories of being taken hostage by other gun-toting players, ambushed by bandits and picked off by camping snipers are rampant, more so than tales of zombie-related mayhem. Graver still is that, unlike most games, when you die in DayZ you lose your character and your gear permanently; you wake up on the beach where you started, fresh and defenceless. Yet, despite the brutality and steep learning curve, DayZ has become a massive success, more talked about and played than ARMA II.
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I Got Buzzed on Killer Japanese Hornet Cocktails

I Got Buzzed on Killer Japanese Hornet Cocktails

Vice — Suzumebachi, a bee-themed bar in Fukuoka, Japan, is known for its poisonous hornet booze. I wanted to try it out, but the result is not for the faint of heart.
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Hannah Epstein wants to get sued

Hannah Epstein wants to get sued

Kill Screen — Hannah Epstein wants to get sued. The Toronto artist's latest work is a choose-your-own adventure implanted in YouTube annotations called Mc Mickey and Air Jordan's Hyperspace Safari that reimagines the internet as a wasteland, "basically empty, but full of life." The internet being what it is, this space is inhabited by memes, conspiracies and copyrighted material sneaking around e-cops, CISPAs and Bill-C11s. You can check your emails from undercover authorities, gamble on Google, sell your panties or i-dose binaural beats with a net wizard. You can also do these things in Hannah's game.
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Miyajima Is the Jurassic Park of Hiroshima

Miyajima Is the Jurassic Park of Hiroshima

Vice — I visited Miyajima, a funny little island off of the coast of Hiroshima, to wrestle aggressive deer for bags of chestnuts and eat possibly radioactive grilled oysters.
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Can pinball tell a story?

Can pinball tell a story?

Kill Screen — One of the first decisions I activated was whether or not I should give Duck a high five. Give Duck a high five? Is it safe to assume that there are no repercussions to "give a kid a high five"? What would the possible damage of giving Duck a high five be? Yes, that happened in one of The Walking Dead' s chapters, but it wasn't a lynchpin that really sticks in the memory. What became of Duck and that high five! And yet, because of the common nature of Telltale's Walking Dead games and their wrought decision tactics, it's hard not to wonder, "What if something abhorrent happens because I gave Duck that high five?"
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Electric Wizard align dark planets on a sea of hair, denim and weed | Chart Attack

Electric Wizard align dark planets on a sea of hair, denim and weed | Chart Attack

Chart Attack — When a dove holding an olive branch swooped into Noah's Ark, it was a good omen. I too saw a good omen during Blood Ceremony's opening set for Electric Wizard in Toronto last night. Three equal-height, identical plumes of hair, one red, one black, one blonde, banging heads in a neat row directly in front of me. They didn't seem to know each other and the blonde had a well-designed gallery of patches (a big blacklight rendition of Wizard's own Witchcult Today cover taking up the most space), but that night we were all one sea of hair, leather and denim, the way that Lee's Palace can become for a sold out doom show.
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Why the Canadian government is investigating a little game about "blowing up" a big pipeline

Why the Canadian government is investigating a little game about "blowing up" a big pipeline

Kill Screen — Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a pipe dream. The Athabasca oil sands, up in Harper's home province Alberta, is an initiative seen as his pet project and is radically divisive among Canadians. The extraction method causes higher carbon emissions than extracting normal crude, and some critics say it wastes more energy than it creates. It also sustains a huge faction of employment in Alberta. The Keystone Pipeline, a massive project that would take the oil from the true North to the heart of Texas, recently backed by the U.S.
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Chipping away at something new

Chipping away at something new

NOW Magazine — As the lines between games and pop music blur, chiptune icons Anamanaguchi push the genre into the mainstream.
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The Hot & Dog: Where Franks and Comics Collide

The Hot & Dog: Where Franks and Comics Collide

Storyboard — Shorty after 3pm each weekday, kids from two Toronto grade schools hang out at a tiny neighborhood hot-dog joint. This is the Hot 'n Dog, where the specialty is toppings. Lots and lots of toppings. Behind the counter is Keith Jones, a cartoonist (and hot dog connoisseur) responsible for graphic novels like dystopian pet epic Catland Empire and abstract-ish activity book Colour Me Busy. Jones loves comics, frumpy cartoon animals and filling up spaces - interests that synced with a Toronto entrepreneur who, a year ago, decided to open a hot dog shop.
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Ball Locked

Ball Locked

Kill Screen — Toronto's last standalone arcade was a nameless corner in the basement of Union Station. It had a solid wall of various pinball tables, a few shooters, a broken change machine, and one to two paper-bag-drinking strangers at any time. When the arcade vanished unceremoniously, around a year ago, so did a dependable, if dirty, arcadium. At one time being littered with them, the city no longer offers zoning permits for arcades. Approaching 40, Torontonian Jason Hazzard and his wife, Rachel, sought a new venture in The Pinball Café on Queen Street's west end.
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Massive Multiplayer Offline: wallFour's Cinematic Experiment

Massive Multiplayer Offline: wallFour's Cinematic Experiment

Dork Shelf — Taking a seat in the sidecar conference room of TIFF's Filmmaker's Lounge, members of the press in the first three rows are handed thick, black, weighted laser pointers. Taking some time to dick around with the red beams of light, swivelling in the air, tracing the legs of the chair in front of them, some members catch on that the tiny red specks have an influence on the screen left of the stage. On the projected screen is a jigsaw puzzle that, when assembled, will form the logo of John Sear and Adam Russel's outfit, wallFour.
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This Video Game Rewrites the Rules of Chess, and It's Fascinating

This Video Game Rewrites the Rules of Chess, and It's Fascinating

The Atlantic — Chess is quite a game. The game. Chess is so old and so esteemed it's often used as a point of legitimacy for other things. If you have a lengthy discussion about Street Fighter, critical or not, you've started a countdown to an inevitable "like chess" comparison. It's easy to pick up and yet so hard to master that becoming the best at it gets you called a prodigy. It's dramatic, it's intensive, and largely seen as balanced. "Why fix what isn't broken?" says two percent of the world's coffee mugs. In any case, the video game XYQ4 is an attempt to break chess just to see what happens.
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Video Game Music: New Directions in Play

Video Game Music: New Directions in Play

Musicworks — Matsuura has no interest in first-person shooters. The games that make him happy are the ones he calls “interactive ground music,” a term, he says, that is “meant to contrast the idea of background music by implying that music plays more than just a secondary role—I think it would be safe to say that there is no widely accepted term for this just yet!”
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When gamers go pro

When gamers go pro

NOW Magazine — Starcraft turned Chris Loranger ‘s life around. But how long until it's game over?
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Do Independent VR Developers Care that Facebook Bought Oculus Rift?

Do Independent VR Developers Care that Facebook Bought Oculus Rift?

Vice — Andrew Ellem is a fedora and popped collar short of looking like a spy. Waiting for a streetcar in Toronto, wearing a long coat, and holding a small black case branded with an eerie eye symbol, he's en route to meet about 30 other dudes with their own identical spooky cases. They are tinkerers, programmers, and enthusiasts. The ominous box is the proto-packaging for the Oculus Rift, that face-hugging virtual reality gizmo that has caught the attention of newbs after being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. This marked a seismic change in the attitudes of Oculus diehards, who helped the product grow through Kickstarter donations.
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A letter to the next generation

A letter to the next generation

NOW Magazine — As PlayStation and Xbox shed their current husks and begin their new evolutions, the concept of what makes a gamer should be redefined, if not eliminated.
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