Ancient Web: xkcd Readers Turned Roller-Coaster Chess into a Photo Gallery

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some readers respond to a webcomic with a comment. In 2007, some responded by taking a chessboard onto a roller coaster and sending the photographic evidence to the artist.

Visit xkcd's Roller Coaster Chess gallery.

The idea began with Randall Munroe's xkcd comic, which imagined playing chess while hurtling along an amusement-park ride. The accompanying photographs were not invented by a content recommendation system. They arrived from actual readers who had chosen to turn a joke into a visual performance.

On July 18, 2007, Munroe posted about the first reader pictures, naming Andrew Burke, Chris Ranker, Ryan DowlingSoka and Chance Brown. He invited more submissions. The surviving page became a compact gallery of moments staged for the cameras that amusement parks normally use to sell souvenir photographs.

The joke escaped its original rules

The collection expands far beyond one board on one coaster. Jared Meadows and Renea Campbell appear at King's Dominion; riders play chess at Six Flags and Legoland in Denmark; another pair turns the activity into checkers. Someone attempts Jenga. Others play on a log flume, pose with a card game or brush their teeth. One photograph involves a helicopter rather than a roller coaster.

Munroe's captions have the conversational immediacy of correspondence with readers. They name participants, relay location details and occasionally comment on what went wrong. A photo from King's Island records an alleged lost king piece; another submission imagines a chess game ending when the board comes apart under stress.

The contemporary July 2007 blog entry establishes that this was a real reader response rather than a later reconstruction of an Internet fad. A 2007 chess-forum discussion shows readers circulating the gallery almost immediately.

The physical stunts should not be copied. Taking loose objects onto rides can endanger passengers and bystanders, and the existence of photographs is not proof that each stunt complied with park rules.

The resulting gallery is a small, perfect artifact of the participatory Web: a drawing became a challenge, readers made their own variations, and the original creator kept the resulting material together under a stable link.

Browse the surviving chess-and-other-games gallery.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.