Interview with Video Games: The Movie Director Jeremy Snead

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SCOTT: Now one of the things that I noticed in the film was that there was very little mention of PC gaming.  Now, me personally as a console gamer, it didn’t bother me; but can you tell me why you decided to focus primarily on console gaming instead of the full gamut there?

JEREMY: It’s tough, because we do have a small section on it that we talk about some of the innovators there.  It’s like a lot of the other topics or genres and sub-genres in gaming that it’s just really difficult to get into a 90-minute film.  PC gaming, as you know, is almost an entire…it’s not a different industry, but it’s definitely a subset of games that you can buy at Wal-Mart and Target, if that makes sense.  You can still get those games on PC, but then the audience is so much deeper and wider, I feel like they know those games, and they know that they’re represented in console as well as PC.  “It was tough” is the short answer.

SCOTT: In the film, you used the really wonderful analogy of “the campfire” to explain what it’s like to be a gamer.  Can you talk about that for a moment and share your inspiration for that idea?

JEREMY: Oh, yeah.  I love that you asked that question.  I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell.  I’ve heard the stories of George Lucas being inspired by him for the story of “Star Wars” and basically that I just love the idea that storytelling really hasn’t changed since the Dark Ages since the dawn of Man.  It’s just telling a story, whether it be around a campfire, or from the pages of a book, or from a screen that you’re sitting in front of in a dark room, or by holding a controller and being a part of the story.  I just love that concept of mythology and how far we’ve come as storytellers.  It used to be that whoever was the best storyteller around the campfire is the one that’s going to be telling it, and now the campfire storytellers are filmmakers or game designers and it’s just exciting to look ahead, even in the next 20 years, to see what’s that campfire going to look like for games and films, for that matter.  It’s hard to get your mind around, but it’s exciting to think about as a filmmaker.

AARON: Hey Jeremy, I want to ask you, during the movie you’ve got creative minds from the gaming industry, you’ve got celebrities that enjoy gaming, and then you’ve got real fans, true gamers themselves.  You’ve got a nice caveat of a different mesh of personalities.  How do each one of those infuse the movie that you ended up making?  Did they bring a little bit of different information, each section?

JEREMY: I think one of my favorite parts of the fans being a part of the film is…you know the age old question, if you’re a gamer or a game historian, you know that there’s always this debate of “Who’s the father of gaming?”  Is it Nolan Bushnell?  Was it Ralph Baer?  Is it Hideo Kojima?  Is it Miyamoto?  Some people say that games really started with Nintendo after the crash.  So I love that we have fans answering that question, because the reality is there’s really no right answer, right?  That was a good example of letting the fans give their cross-section of answers and then industry people we tried to really focus on in the section where we talk about game development and game design.  We tried to really rely heavily on some of the more prominent game designers during that section.  But throughout the film, having celebrities, people that are game designers per say, but are gamers and also happen to be a public persona, having them in the film makes it a little bit easier entry to just the average Joe that doesn’t know who Hideo Kojima is, if that makes sense.

AARON: No, there’s a lot of people that have no idea who these guys are, and I think your movie does a very nice job of illustrating to the “common man”, I would say, exactly what goes on behind closed doors.

SCOTT: One of the things that stuck out to me was the amount of content that you were able to pack into this movie.  There was probably over 100 different video captures of different video games, and I gotta wonder how difficult it was to be able to get that in a feature-length film.  Did you have to get permission for each game’s appearance?

JEREMY: Yeah, yeah we did.

AARON: Oh, wow.

JEREMY:  Luckily, we had the industry behind us.  Once we got to the point where we started editing, we had a really great publicity with the Kickstarter and the industry was really supportive.  Some of the stuff is we rely on the “fair use” doctrine if the company doesn’t exist anymore.  You use the old cliché ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’  That was kind of how that worked.