The Scrapyard Challenge is a global workshop started in 2003 by ITP alums Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki that gives people with little or no electronics skills the chance to build innovative digital controllers out of junk materials. The workshop has been held hundreds of times in 17 countries with 6 different themes: wearables, arcade controllers, MIDI instruments, public installations, circuit bending, and networked objects.

Scrapyard Challenge Workshops - Official Website

' This version of the workshop is an interactive, classic arcade game controller design workshop where participants will build novel controllers for classic arcade games such as Street Fighter, Ms.PacMan, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Crash Bandicoot, Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, and more.

Participants are split into 4 groups and can choose a classic video game and design a novel controller (the crazier the better!) to control all aspects of the game such as 1, 2, 3 player controls, action buttons including jump, kick, punch, shoot, magic and controller directions such as up, down right, left. The goal is to make each game as interactive as possible with full-body control systems built from scrap materials and junk. The workshop uses USB encoder boards and RaspberryPi computers running RetroPie for game emulation.

Here's a video of a past arcade workshop we ran at NYC Resistor:

And here's a video from the workshop at Monmouth University in New Jersey:

Here's an idea for 4 player Pong: