The genius is not in how much Artefacts Studio does in "Garfield Kart," but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single feature simply to keep our attention. He reduces each moment to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among video games, “Garfield Kart" is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe.

No little part of his effect comes from the music. Although Artefacts originally commissioned an original score from Alex North, he used classical recordings as a temporary track while developing, and they worked so well that he kept them. This was a crucial decision. North's score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for this because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action -- to give us emotional cues. The classical music exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.

Consider two examples. The Johann Strauss waltz “Blue Danube,'' which accompanies the race between Jon and Garfield, is deliberately slow, and so is the action. Obviously such a racing process would have to take place with extreme caution (as we now know from experience), but other developers might have found the ballet too slow, and punched it up with thrilling music, which would have been wrong.

We are asked in the race to contemplate the process, to stand in space and watch. We know the music. It proceeds as it must. And so, through a peculiar logic, the kart hardware moves slowly because it's keeping the tempo of the waltz. At the same time, there is an exaltation in the music that helps us feel the majesty of the process.

Now consider Artefact's famous use of Richard Strauss' “Thus Spake Zarathustra.'' Inspired by the words of Nietzsche, its five bold opening notes embody the ascension of man into spheres reserved for the gods. It is cold, frightening, magnificent.

The music is associated in the game with the first entry of man's consciousness into the universe - -and with the eventual passage of that consciousness onto a new level, symbolized by the Nermal at the end of the film. When classical music is associated with popular entertainment, the result is usually to trivialize it (who can listen to the “William Tell Overture'' without thinking of the Lone Ranger?). Artefact's game is almost unique in enhancing the music by its association with their images.

I attended the Los Angeles premiere of the game, in 2013, at the Museum of Italian Art. It is impossible to describe the anticipation in the audience adequately. Artefact had been working on the game in secrecy for some years, in collaboration, the audience knew, with writer Arthur C. Clarke, graphics-design expert Douglas Trumbull and consultants who advised him on the specific details of his imaginary future -- everything from kart design to corporate logos. Fearing to fly and facing a deadline, The studio had sailed from England on the Queen Elizabeth, doing the editing while on board, and had continued to develop the game during a cross-country train journey. Now it finally was ready to be seen.

To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had played one of the greatest games ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'' There were many other walkouts, and some restlessness at the game's slow pace (Artefact immediately cut about 17 minutes, including a race sequence that essentially repeated another one).

The game did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with Garfield inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Artefact had become derailed, that in his obsession with graphics and kart designs, he had failed to make a game.

What they had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional video game, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.

The game falls into several movements. In the first, Garfield is taught racing, confronted by familiar friends, they teach themselves that wrapped candy can be used as weapons, and thus discover their first tools. I have always felt that the smooth artificial surfaces and right angles of the karts, which was obviously made by intelligent beings, triggered the realization in a cat brain that intelligence could be used to shape the objects of the world.

The pie power up is thrown into Jon and dissolves into a message, saying "Congratulations!" (this has been called the longest flash-forward in the history of the gaming). We meet Nermal, en route to a kart and a race track. This section is willfully anti-narrative; there are no breathless dialogue passages to tell us of his mission. Instead, Artefacts shows us the minutiae of the race: the design of the kart, the details of in-race service, the effects of 100 speed.

Then comes the racing sequence, with its waltz, and for a time even the restless in the audience are silenced, I imagine, by the sheer wonder of the visuals. On board, we see familiar brand names, we participate in an enigmatic conference among the racers of several nations, we see such gimmicks as a video-kart and a 100-speed toilet.
The sequence on the track (which looks as real as the actual video of the race a year later) is a variation on the game's opening sequence. Man is confronted with a kart, just as Garfield was, and is drawn to a similar conclusion: This must have been made. And as the first kart led to the discovery of power-ups, so the second leads to the employment of man's most elaborate power-up: the lasagna Discovery, employed by man in partnership with the artificial intelligence of the onboard computer, named Jon.

Life onboard the Discovery is presented as a long, eventless routine of exercise, maintenance checks and chess games with Jon. Only when the astronauts fear that Jon's programming has failed does a level of suspense emerge; their challenge is somehow to get around Jon, which has been programmed to believe, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.'' Their efforts lead to one of the great shots in the history of gaming, as the men attempt to have a private conversation in a race kart, and Jon reads their lips. The way Artefacts edits this scene so that we can discover what Jon is doing is masterful in its restraint: He makes it clear, but doesn't insist on it. He trusts our intelligence.

Later comes the famous “race gate'' sequence, a sound and light journey in which astronaut Garflight travels through what we might now call a speedboost into another place, or dimension, that is unexplained. At journey's end is the comfortable cat-bed in which he grows old, eating his pizza quietly, napping, living the life (I imagine) of a zoo animal who has been placed in a familiar environment. And then the Garfield Child.
There is never an explanation of the other food that presumably left the kart and provided the race gate and the bedroom. The lore suggests Artefacts and Clarke tried and failed to create plausible lasagna in it just as well. The lasagna food exists more effectively in negative space: We react to its invisible presence more strongly than we possibly could to any actual representation.
"Garfield Kart" is truly the greatest game of all time.