Interview with Video Games: The Movie Director Jeremy Snead

 

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SCOTT: That’s fantastic.  Now the movie itself feels as though your aiming for two different audiences: gamers themselves and also those who may know what video games are, but have never really touched a controller in their lives.  Can you tell us a bit why you decided to go that route?

JEREMY: I feel like we all have the same, if not similar, nostalgic feelings about the 8-bit and 16-bit era, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sonic, Mega Man, Mario.  And then there’s this big gap from the late 90’s until now of when the “next generation” of games started coming out from N64 to now XBOX One and PS4 of people that feel like ‘I don’t know what that is.  That’s not what I grew up with: Pac-Man or Mario.  That’s something else,’ when, in fact, it really is the same.  The technology’s evolved.  It’s become a more vibrant art form and more interactive, but I really wanted to bridge that gap to make a film that people could come in and, whatever age they’re at, if they’re young, maybe get an education on classic games and where games came from.  But if you’re on the other side, if you’re a little bit older, you can be nostalgic about the games you grew up with, but then see that connection of game designers and the industry and the vibrant community of gamers now that have brought the medium from those primitive days to where it is now.

AARON: Was part of that because you were tired of that old mantra that gamers were only guys that sit around in their mom’s basement playing video games?

JEREMY: Ha ha, yeah.  Yeah, anyone that’s a gamer, you get nauseated by it, because you’ve heard it so many times.

SCOTT: Absolutely.

AARON: I loved the facts at the beginning of the movie, because that was so well done.  I mean, everything you said, you just hammered the point: “Hey guess what? This is not gaming 20 years ago.”

JEREMY: Yeah, that whole section of the statistics of who gamers are and where they live and what the average gamer looks like, I really wanted to focus on that early on in the movie to say ‘OK, let’s really lay the groundwork of what this medium is and who it affects,” and then we’ll get into the story.

SCOTT: Absolutely.  I think that people don’t even realize how large the industry is or at least a layperson does.  Now, moving on with some more content from the film, you were able to get a lot of interviews with big names in the industry.  We know Cliff Bleszinski was a producer, but what was your process for getting other industry legends like Hideo Kojima, Reggie FIls-Aime, and Nolan Bushnell?

JEREMY: The short answer is [that] it’s sort of a snowball.  I started out with the contacts that I had.  Some of the bigger publishers like Activision and Capcom [joined].  Once I got a handful of legitimate industry people on film, it was a little bit easier to then kind of snowball that into getting Gearbox and Epic Games.  Nolan Bushnell was a later one.  I think once he saw that we were legitimate and had most of the industry represented, he came on board, very similar to Hideo Kojima, Mark Cerny, a lot of people that we got at the 11^th hour.  I will say, as a side note, that the Kickstarter, it did as much for us in publicity as it did for giving us resources to finish the film.