Brian Corrigan faced plenty of challenges in mounting his ambitious OhHeckYeah art project — including explaining what it was in the first place.

“The best way we communicate it is by letting people experience it,” said Corrigan, who worked with Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran College of Art & Design before coming to Denver. “So usually we bring the video games with us and talk about it and then let people play it.”

OhHeckYeah, which sprang to life last year with a $200,000 grant from ArtPlace America, is what Corrigan calls “an immersive street arcade.” Each Thursday and Saturday night between June 7 and July 26, Champa Street between 14th and 16th Streets downtown will transform into a video game-driven street-art festival.

The free event is centered around a trio of games designed exclusively for OhHeckYeah, which can be played by anyone on the giant LED screens of the Denver Theatre District using the Xbox’s Kinect motion-control system.

“Your body is literally the joystick of the game,” Corrigan said.

The cartoonish, custom-made games — Catchy, Big Blue’s Hood Slam (featuring the iconic “big blue bear” from the sculpture outside the Colorado Convention Center) and Tinker Bot — will be backed with local street art, a rotating cast of live music and comedy, karaoke, food vendors and more as Champa Street also shuts down between 15th and 16th Streets.

“It’s a really interesting design problem of making games for public consumption,” Corrigan said of OhHeckYeah developers like Mode Set and Legwork Studio. “You have to design for the extreme examples, because it’s really complex to take that technology and simplify it so anyone, at any age, can walk up and play without any instruction.”

Corrigan’s goal is to bring the talents of various city and private creative agencies — including the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, which recorded the original scores for the games — together in making the games, then use the power of play to connect random people on street. The 2,862 square feet of digital LED screens in the Denver Theatre District will broadcast it for the estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people who visit the 16th Street Mall each day.

“It’s really a pretty literal way to play in the streets,” said Ginger White Brunneti, deputy director of Denver Arts & Venues, which supports the project along with the Downtown Denver Partnership and other nonprofits. “And this project checks us a lot of boxes for us in terms of innovation, cultivating local talent and so on.”

The project will also undoubtedly benefit from the expected 70,000 nerds who will flood the area during the Denver Comic Con June 13-15, having been already primed for such novel and experimental — if seemingly abstract — activities.

“One of the more difficult things we’ve encountered with this is selling the vision,” said Corrigan. “We started with nothing, but as we start to put tangible stuff out there more people have wanted to get involved.”

Corrigan sees OhHeckYeah as an annual event that will grow ever-more-connected with social media, open-source code for the games and more artistic collaboration. Since getting the $200,000 Artplace grant, he has raised another $116,000 for the project.

“The fact that it is experimental and at this ‘nexis location’ for us is what really interested us,” White Brunneti said. “And when they got the grant from ArtPlace it showed a lot of people this was something worth paying attention to. It’s a really bold experiment.”

As unique as OhHeckYeah may be — Corrigan and his partners can’t think of another example like it in the world — it still needs to prove it can draw people.

But Corrigan’s past work, including the “3D mapping” art project “Frame of Mind,” which projected custom video images on buildings like the Ellie Caulkins Opera House (think exploding fountains of virtual marbles and distorted architecture), has proven he can deliver that, according to David Ehrlich, executive director of the Denver Theatre District.

“There are a lot of formal and informal metrics we’ll use to see if this works,” Ehrlich said. “But Brian’s brought together some very important stakeholders in this area, and there’s an energy created when you have 2,000 people in the street.”

So is it a high-minded art project or a summer festival? Retro arcade-bars like the 1Up have proven they can bring people off their couches to play video games at events like the Kong Off, the Donkey Kong world championships. And Corrigan thinks OhHeckYeah has even more going for it than that.

“Our real way to measure its success is if people have fun or not,” he said.

John Wenzel: 303-954-1642, jwenzel@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnwenzel