A few weeks ago I wrote a story about the wealth of video game documentaries that were out there or coming soon, and one of the commenters mentioned Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball. I hadn’t seen this before, and hadn’t even heard about it. It’s a documentary about the Pinball 2000 project that Williams Electronics, the world’s largest pinball manufacturer at the time, initiated to try and meld video games and pinball machines into one gaming unit. The effort ultimately failed, and signaled the death blow for pinball machines.
Director Greg Maletic could have focused on the entire history of pinball, from the early beginnings as “bagatelle” in the 1700s, to its current near-death rattle, but instead he chose to single out the Pinball 2000 project from Williams. He was able to speak with all of the players involved, except for the actual plug-pullers at Williams, and it’s an amazing documentary that stands as a testament to what could have been.
I saw Danny Ledonne’s documentary Playing Columbine at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles recently. Ledonne’s film documents and discusses the controversy surrounding the video game he created in 2005 called Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Ledonne had released the game anonymously on the internet, thinking that maybe 25 or so people would download and play it, and nothing would come of it.Reactions from people ranged from incensed to amused, and most journalists at the time condemned the game, many without even playing it.
The game generated more attention than he could have imagined, and when a friend of one of the Columbine High shooting victims did a little amateur detective work, Ledonne’s identity was exposed and the hate mail came pouring in. He submitted the game to the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker’s Competition in 2007, where it was accepted but then later pulled. As a result, most of the other gamemakers in competition pulled out, and the Interactive Media Division of USC pulled their sponsorship for the event as well. Ledonne was recording all of this at the time, and later decided to put it together in what became this documentary.
As both a video game journalist and a film journalist, at first I was trying to decide if this was just the case of someone creating something without much merit, and then backpedaling and trying to cover their facts, or was it the case of an artist trying to get a message across in a non-traditional medium, and then documenting the process? Ultimately, I enjoyed Playing Columbine not because of the treatment of the game, but because of the issues it created and the dialogue it attempts to open about violence in video games. However, I would have at least liked to see some reaction from the victims or perhaps parents or significant others that were involved.
The film is screening this weekend at the Denver Film Festival, and at the Sante Fe Film Festival immediately after that. I spoke with Danny recently, and you can read the complete interview with him after the break.
Like a video game screen that says “Continue?”, video game documentaries keep popping up with extra lives. Just last week I wrote about the documentary Chasing Ghosts and how it’s a better movie than The King of Kong, and the good news is that Chasing Ghosts is now coming out next month on a cable channel near you. The even better news is that there are a lot more in the pipeline, and a few others worth seeking out and watching. Besides these two retro gaming documentaries, here’s a roundup of new and recent video game films that’ll keep you pushing buttons. Check out the list after the break.
When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated Ghostbusters video game written by Dan Ackroyd and featuring vocal contributions from Bill Murray and the rest of the main cast of the film franchise, which was said to pick up narratively where Ghostbusters 2 led off. Now Atari has taken the game off Vivendi’s hands, with speculative plans to release it next year in concert with the first film’s 25th anniversary.
Sam Mendes has been hired to direct a cinematic adaptation of Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s graphic novel about a religulous man fighting evil post-apocalypse.
Dylan McDermott, Zoe Saldana, Lake Bell, Nick Stahl, Paz Vega and Shannen Doherty will star in Burning Palms, a satire of Los Angeles stereotypes from writer/director Christopher Landon, which producer Oren Segal says is “kind of like a John Waters version of Short Cuts.”
Max Payne had a fairly complex plot for a video game. Detective Max Payne comes home one day and finds junkies in his home, and kills a couple of them before discovering that they’ve murdered his wife and infant child. He decides to transfer to the DEA as a result, and later discovers that there is a link between the pharmaceutical company his wife used to work for, the junkies, the mafia, and dirty DEA agents. The game was also infamous for featuring scenes inside Max’s head: there’s the constant sound of a baby crying, and you have to walk along a blood trail on the ground suspended over a dark void. If you fall off, Max fully loses it, goes nuts, and dies. To this day the “baby levels” are still used as examples of nightmare-inducing bad game design.
The Mark Wahlberg-starring movie, which opens today, tries to simplify the plot, and ends up differing from the game quite a bit. However, those changes are for the worse. What was a dark and gritty video game full of gunplay becomes a stylistic mess where the director tries to imitate other movies.
In the 1980s it seemed like Hollywood hated everything that was going to compete with it: television, video games, books, comics, you name it. If it wasn’t being used as an ancillary product for a movie, then it was the enemy. Why would an executive want to embrace something like Spider-Man or Space Invaders and try turning it into a movie? Which, granted might be why so many movies from the 1980s were classic. Where’s our next John Hughes, already? If there was a video game announced tomorrow based on Ferris Bueller’s DayOff or Weird Science, I would retire this column for eternity. Unless the game sucked.
But what about movies that came out years ago that still live on through video games? Games have single-handedly managed to keep some franchises flush with cash, long before the currently Hollywood trend of retreading, prequelizing, and refurbishing movie happened. Now, you’re just as likely to have a game coming out day in date with the movie, if not a few weeks before in an effort to hype the buzz. But what about those that came before? Here are a few examples.
I haven’t opened my RSS reader in three weeks, so it’s taking me some time to get situated this morning. Sometime over the next couple of days, I can promise you that we’re going to wrap our Toronto coverage, which will include interviews with Ari Folman and Kathryn Bigelow, and as of Wednesday I’ll be in Austin to attend this year’s Fantastic Fest.
As a side note: I woke up this morning and read the Black Monday headlines, and all I could think of was Scrooge McDuck. Do you remember that Duck Tales video game where Scrooge and his nephews compete to see who can “collect the most money” in 30 days, in order to be declared DIME Magazine’s Duck of the Year? No? Oh, that’s probably because it was terrible. But the opening narrative bit, set to digital bagpipes, is pretty great, especially when Mr. McDuck declares, “I’ll be the winner, and I’ll win!” Luckily, someone played the entire game and put it on YouTube. Entertain yourself while I weed out my pre-Sarah Palin feeds.
There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
A friendly bit of Spout promotion: over on the main site, we’re running a contest and giving away a Nintendo Wii. Just go here, agree to the legalese, follow the clues and find the treasure chests. You could be starring in your own injury clip in no time.
The whole Lucas/Spielberg Indy 4 cover made a certain kind of sense. It’s an epic narrative, the story of underdogs turned Hollywood royalty, and it’s also about the passing of torch from the star sphere of the 70s-80s-90s to the new generation, however annoyingly it may be embodied by Shia LaBouf. This kind of reification of Hollywood myth is the only way to pay Graydon Carter’s salary nowadays, even if it’s not something the average Christopher Hitchens reader really has much use for.
But why is Vanity Fair exhaustively covering a new Star Wars video game? To the point where they’ve not only posted a three-pager about the technology behind Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but a 14-page slideshow of stills from the game itself? Are they that desperate to win the Digg crowd, and if so, do they really think teenage gamers will become loyal customers after this issue reels them in? Was this a contractual thing––ie: did Lucas only agree to the Indy interview on the grounds that the game would get coverage as well? And if so, why didn’t he offer better quality images than the one screen-capped at right?
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated 
