A Masterpiece from HoC Productions

Fine, start your mocking, but I think it's pretty cool and it took a lot of work

Updated 03-19-2009 – Kr replaced with Superman Returns: the videogame. Kameo: Elements of Power moved to K. Peter Jackson's King Kong removed. Sorry there big guy. Should have been updated at all locations.

So this first came out of seeing this link for IHC's Periodic Table of Video Game Characters which lead us back to a Digg link for a Periodic Table of Cartoon Characters.

Shortly after starting the process Gizmodo found and linked The Periodic Table of Typefaces.

I sent the Video Game Characters to Coxxorz and it lead to a conversation about an Xbox 360 specific version of a Periodic Table. This was mocked by Coxxorz with the observation that there wouldn't be enough Xbox 360 games for a full Periodic Table.

So the challenge was on!

Technically, I did have to move beyond the Xbox 360 and delve into original Xbox, Xbox Live Arcade and pre-release games but I did complete a full 118 element Periodic Table.

Which is particularly surprising as my first version only had 110 elements. 118? Who knew? It wasn't my fault! It was the first version that I found on the the web!! Then I found Webelements which set me straight with 118 elements (good) and "UUx" names instead of "UNx" names (bad).

The first chart I found and based everything on had the elements 104-110 starting with "UN" particularly useful in the case of "UNO" (no kidding) but after having them changed to the correct 112-118 starting with "UU" things got uglier. Don't get me wrong, "UUO" is still Uno but the connection is, well, weaker.

So coming up with 118 matching elements took a while and they changed substantially during the different layouts as I kept thinking of something that fit better (I've made two changes since I started this story). Of course, changing one usually meant stealing from another. I also had some difficulty finding good quality cover images. Particularly for the pre-release games.

I tried to follow some basic guidelines in my choices:

• preference to Xbox 360 games
• no duplicates from a series (only one Halo, C&C, Tomb Raider, etc)
• preference to direct elemental match
• preference for HoC favourites
• preference for direct alphabetical match
• second preference for reasonable alphabetical match
• third preference for any remote alphabetical match
• preference for a complete suspension of belief...

I will post a chart of Elements and their corresponding Xbox games at a later date.

In fact, I am pretty happy with most of the matches. Only a few got into the "really out there" territory. But 99% of them are acceptable. I'll let you figure out which ones don't really fit. And I am sure I will be hearing all about your own preferred choices.

This is an completely original Herd of Cats production, btw. And is probably one of the first productions that I actively want to distribute across the internet.

You can download a lo-res version of the original PDF here: HoCPeriodicTableofXbox.

Those of you that know my email can ask for a hi-res 3.5MB pdf and I will email it directly to you. Every time I post a large file on Herd of Cats Q-Bert's eye twitch gets worse so I try to avoid it. Be sure to use my tygerteam account.

*Update*: Posted a chart of the Xbox games and the corresponding elements. As promised.