Made for the solo exhibition No One Has Taught Us More Than John at Magician Space, this 2026 version of Once Upon a Time in America is a handheld-console installation and text-based adventure game. The work borrows the promise of portable play: a small object, a box, a screen, and a character who seems ready to move. Yet the fiction sends the player through bureaucratic labyrinths, language barriers, and cultural displacements. The interface offers choices; the story repeatedly returns those choices to the same structural constraints.
Three lives run in parallel inside the console: a woman held under guard in a single room, a mother sealed into her apartment, and a soul drifting through a red city among the recently dead. They barely touch until the end, when the dead return a face and a memory to the living and help push one of them out, still breathing, into whatever comes next.
Process notes
I designed the writing and interaction for a handheld format rather than a conventional screen. Invitro Lab ported the work to a white R36S — a translucent clone with a pirated Game Boy-like body, the kind of object that promises a few idle hours. In the gallery a demo machine plays itself at a fixed pace, scrolling the text and choosing branches, so that even watching, you feel that choosing is already being managed.
Between chapters the story hands you small arcade games, and they work as its organs. A Tetris whose lowest block can no longer be cleared; a snake that strangles on everything it has gathered; a runner you can only exit by failing — each puts your hands inside a structure that grows more total the harder you press against it.
Handheld simulation
The simulation opens in a new tab so the full 3D model, screen, sound, and physical controls retain their intended scale.
- Launch Once Upon a Time in America Full-screen edition restored from the APK narrative, original images, the Cubic_11 Unity font, and chapter music.
Exhibitions
- 2026, No One Has Taught Us More Than John, Magician Space, Beijing, China (CN) — Solo exhibition documentation, Magician Space. This record refers to the 2026 handheld-console installation and its Once Upon-interface production materials.