Black Hole Master

This game is in 'beta' status. This means the game is in active development and can contain bugs. Features are not yet complete and will change between versions.

At the moment this game is two-player only. You need two game controllers and one friend to play this!

Black Hole Master is a simple, fast and difficult arcade game for two players. In a galaxy far away, an alien civilisation has mastered the control of stars and black holes. You are a Black Hole Master, a player trained for participating in the popular black hole battles. This app is free on all platforms, it has no ads and no in-app purchases.

Black Hole Master is a light-hearted remake of one of the first computer games, Pong. In this remake, each player now controls a black hole! The objective: to use the gravitational force of the black hole and a slingshot motion to fling approaching stars towards the other player.

The game is being developed by a group of scientists working in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. We want to make free and fun apps related to our work. The LIGO project has built a completely new class of observatory that can detect gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time. They are produced by violent cosmic events, such as the collision of black holes.

Please send us your suggestions, comments and bug reports so that we can improve the game. You can use the comment section at the bottom of this page or contact us at laserlabs.org. Thanks a lot!

Release Notes:

Version 0.1.2, 03 August 2018

• Adding new music, fixing a bug with wormholes

Version 0.1.1, 08 October 2016

• Adding different background images for some menus

Version 0.1.0, 25 September 2016

• First alpha release for testing in science events and fairs

Controls:

On Windows/OSX/Linux

• Use two game controllers and follow the instruction on screen
• Press ESC to exit the 'endless' mode
• Press M to mute or un-mute the game

On Android/iOS

• Touch control for the black holes and the user interface

Requirements:

• two game controllers (tested with Xbox controllers)
• Windows XP SP2+
• Mac OS X 10.8+
• Ubuntu 12.04+
• a friend to play with (local two-player only)

Known Issues:

• We cannot test or support the Linux version at the moment.

OSX

• Extract the downloaded archive with the OSX archiver
• Start the BlackHoleMaster.app file

Windows

• Unzip the downloaded archive
• Start BlackHoleMaster.exe

Linux

• Unzip the downloaded archive with 'unzip'
• Start BlackHoleMaster.x86 (for 32bit OS) or BlackHoleMaster.x86_64 (for 64bit OS)

We will publish this game on iOS and Android stores later, meanwhile you might want to try the apk file below for your Androind phone.