People like lists. Why not? Top ten movies that changed your life as a teen? All-time top three video games that rocked your world? You do the checklist and then compare it with your peers. It’s part of the appeal of nostalgia, right? Oh, you don’t rate my top five tv shows of the 90s? I don’t think we can hang out...
There was a lot of that kind of stock-taking of video games in the 2010s. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me back in 2014 when I was getting serious about making a film about the gamedev experience. I considered INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE to be an outlier, while there was a seemingly endless bunch of clones of THE VIDEO GAME REVOLUTION, VIDEO GAMES: THE MOVIE, HOW VIDEO GAMES CHANGED THE WORLD, GAME ON!: THE UNAUTHORIZED HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES, and FROM BEDROOMS TO BILLIONS. There’s nothing WRONG with this style of film. I just didn’t see the need for so MANY of them. Case in point:
August 26, 2020
Lots of buzz about the Netflix series about video games, HIGH SCORE. I'm sure it's fine, but I'm going to pass. I've seen too many list documentaries itemizing the highlights for the golden age of gaming. I mean it's fine, there's room for more historic reflections, but I never really wanted to see that in the first place. That's why I'm making HEART OF NEON, for a different take on a gaming history.
What HIGH SCORE most definitely will be is good HEART OF NEON background watching for people not already familiar with the video game industry and its history. A bit of context goes a long way : )
…I mean, yeah, why wouldn’t it be? I just felt these inventory, list-based highlights-of-history shows don’t play well for people who really KNOW the history OR for the people who might be sort of curious but are turned off by the niche-ness of it. Ultimately there is some fan service going on. They’re not meant to be insightful or profound, they are describing a fan experience, or are catering to fans who crave more facts about the period. I liked FROM BEDROOMS TO BILLIONS, but the thoroughness of the history leaves no room for the human details I like in films about artists. I wanted to make a film about artists. Inventory films are about historical artifacts. It’s over. Let’s take stock. But game development is very much alive.
Jeff Minter, as a human being and an active, prolific artist, addressed my dichotomy: I wanted to talk about video games the way they were made back in the day because that seemed less dysfunctional than the way they are made now by AAA companies. Jeff still makes games largely the same way, so I don’t have to deal with people accusing me of some BS nostalgic “the olds ways were better” kind of argument. Jeff is more an example of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Jeff is old school, always working, currently active, and even winning awards for stuff like POLYBIUS because his stuff is GREAT. If there’s a purity to Jeff’s games, is partly a refinement of his art but it’s also a response to the necessities of the market. He reins in ambition so he can live within his means. How rare is that? That’s the single most remarkable thing about him. He doesn’t reflect the values of the larger market, the so-called “video games industry”, in any way shape or form. He’s just himself.
My point is, the thing about inventory movies are that they reflect the agreed upon version of the history. It’s not about nuance and detail, it’s about dates and names and how this led to that etc etc etc. It’s a map. But the map isn’t territory. I wanted to get into the weeds with Jeff. I wanted to understand the changes in the video game industry since I’d abandoned it through his eyes. That was interesting to me. I believe it will be interesting to other people too.
I think people expect a list movie about Jeff from me. Started in the 80s, Jeff did this, did that, blah blah blah. And, no mistake, there is some of that in there. But Jeff has been so prolific that to do a list movie about his career would take hours and hours to tell. My partnership with Digital Eclipse was a real godsend because I get to enlarge Jeff’s story space and share the details of his 8-bit and 16-bit dev career that I just didn’t have room for in HEART OF NEON. That’s a rare, impossible-to-repeat gift to a filmmaker.
HEART OF NEON is not a list film. And that’s fine. HEART OF NEON is a film about a guy who loves what he does, who is VERY good at what he does, and who found some people who loved what he does too. And because of who Jeff is, those people became part of the process, mostly by accident, and something wonderful came out of that intersection between artist and audience.
Yes, Jeff is without question living in the spine of video game history. But if you take away the distraction of the big picture history stuff, there’s something real and raw and beautiful in there.
That’s what HEART OF NEON is.