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With the tenth anniversary of E3 upon us this week, it?s the perfect time to reflect on the impact the video game industry has made on Hollywood and the rest of society over the past 50 years. Recently, we had the opportunity to do just that as executive producers of GSN?s action-packed, original documentary, ?VIDEO GAME INVASION: THE HISTORY OF A GLOBAL OBSESSION,? hosted by pro skateboarder and video game superstar Tony Hawk. (If you missed the premiere on March 21, check us out at the Video Game Museum in Booth #6301 at E3)
The project took us back to the earliest days of an industry that started in 1958 when a nuclear scientist named Willy Higgenbotham created a crude tennis-type game on an oscilloscope. Nearly fifty years later, video games have evolved into a 20-billion dollar industry--making it a bigger business today than current domestic box office receipts. Producing this documentary also presented us with some fascinating new human and technological challenges?challenges we embraced with the same passion we bring to playing our favorite video games, which at the moment happen to be ?Metal Gear Solid 2,? ?Halo,? ?Prince of Persia,? ?High Heat Baseball? and ?Animal Crossing? for Carr and ?James Bond: Everything or Nothing? for Comtois.
Game On
When Rich Cronin, president/CEO of GSN, selected us to produce VIDEO GAME INVASION, we knew three things. Number one, it was going to be tricky to distill 50 years of complicated history into two hours of compelling television.
Number two, we were going to have to tell a chronological story with material that didn?t necessarily occur in a straight line. In the history of video games, many divergent things were often happening at the same time: the development of early console gaming, early arcade gaming, the rise of Game Boy handhelds and other handheld gaming, the creation of the new consoles, computer gaming, multiplayer games, even cell-phone gaming? . So how do you move the story in a linear fashion when a lot of what happened was not linear?
Number three, we had to give the millions of die-hard video game fans around the country today more than just a mere recounting of the industry?s major technological advancements.
With all this in mind, we decided from the very beginning to present VIDEO GAME INVASION as the real life epic story it truly is instead of a straightforward, standard documentary. Given all the off-the-wall, wildly colorful characters involved in this business with no boundaries, this wasn?t hard to do. We found drama, humor, suspense and intrigue at every corner. Rags-to-riches-(to-rags again) stories? You bet. Wild parties? Plenty of them. Backstabbings, betrayals and million-dollar lawsuits? More than we could ever fit into just two hours.
In the end, we interviewed over 40 people and shot hundreds of hours of gaming footage, resulting in a final edit boasting 80 percent new material and 20 percent archival. And the good news is that we?ve still got plenty of terrific video available for at least a dozen or so sequels, so stay tuned!
Meet the Players
Thanks to Steven Kent, author of ?The Ultimate History of Video Games,? we were able to locate most of our interview subjects fairly easily. (Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts and 3DO, proved most elusive but we eventually tracked him down in a surreal ?six degrees of Kevin Bacon?-type fashion.) Remember, this is a personality-driven special, so allow us to list starring credits here: Ralph Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey console; Nolan Bushnell, Atari founder; Al Alcorn, designer of ?Pong;? David Crane and Alan Miller, co-founders of Activision; John Romero, co-creator of ?Wolfenstein 3D,? ?Doom,? and ?Quake;? Al Kahn, former Coleco executive; Al Lowe, lead programmer at Sierra On-line; Will Wright, creator of ?SimCity;? Bing Gordon, co-founder of Electronic Arts; Alexey Pajitnov, inventor of ?Tetris;? Rand Miller, co-creator of ?Myst;? John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment; Peter Molyneux, creator of ?Black & White? and ?Populous;? and Seamus Blackley, the lead designer for the Microsoft Xbox; among many others.
Although we had a lot of cooperation from our interview subjects, we still had to travel all over the place, including England, New Hampshire, Dallas, Seattle, Spokane and the Bay Area, to get their sound bytes. We also did some shooting here in L.A., where we?re based. Obviously, we didn?t have the luxury of a studio setting, given all the different locales, so in order to get a consistent look on-camera, we decided from the start to shoot everyone in black limbo. We hung up black material behind everybody, then in post-production we composited graphics and gameplay images onto the black area behind the interviewees to add more information and visual excitement.
And, because we didn?t want a lot of boring headshots one right after the other, we also added a color scheme to the interviews: We?d frontlight each person with a white light, then backlight them with different colors?reds and oranges for the ?fiery? personalities; shades of green and gold for the X-Box guys, and so on. We had to keep a log on who was what color, to make sure we had different colors as we cut between them.
To shoot the interviews, it seemed only fitting to use Sony PD150 DVCam cameras on such a digitally-themed project. Besides, DV is small and portable, which is perfect for travel with a skeleton crew. (Translation: no budget for PAs to carry the heavy stuff.) Occasionally, we would mix in a Panasonic Mini 24-P or a Beta SP if necessary when working with a local photographer without access to DV. But for the most part, we did two DV-camera interviews, which allowed us to shoot both straight on and from an extreme side angle to give it a little edge. This also provided more flexibility, of course, in cutting away between images in the editing room.
The Hunt Is On
Ironically, our producer Frankie Glass and associate producer Bryan Cooper spent almost as much time searching for classic video games and consoles as they did setting up interviews with the people who created them. They scoured retro video game stores and arcades, reviewed private collections and surfed on eBay to locate everything from the Atari 2600 console to an original version of the notorious and obscure game called ?Night Trap.? At one point, we all went through a warehouse in Sun Valley, California, that housed thousands of arcade machines stacked ten deep.
Once we found the games and consoles, we had to experiment to find the best way to shoot the game play. At first, we linked the console image directly into the recorder; but that only gave us a full-frame image; we couldn?t zoom in or pan around. So we shot most of the video games right off the screen, hooking up the consoles to an LCD monitor. That gave us more of a flat look, and created less reflection, and also allowed us to focus on different details of the game.
The next step was to get to the point in the game that we wanted to capture on video. Fortunately, we had an expert player in our office, Carlos Gonzalez, director of operations at Beantown, who could play through the more recent games really quickly and get us to where we wanted to be. But for some of the older games, we had to go on the Internet to find walkthroughs and cheat sheets so we could get down to the level we needed to shoot. Or we?d sit there and feed in enough quarters in an arcade version of Mortal Kombat until we found a certain death move?all while trying to keeping an eye on our tight budget, of course.
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