Category: General

Maybe there are some sci-fi fans out there who are looking for a little distraction these days in the form of movies and stories about space games. For you guys, I’ve got something:

All of games.film’s content is available for free now. The “free” versions on our YouTube channel have been hidden, instead the paid versions (which were originally only available to buyers of space.games.film) can be viewed by everyone for free without watermarks and additional text panels. If you want to get the full space.games.film experience, check out this playlist here 😉 And you can download all the PDFs and browse through the anecdotes from the shop while listening to the soundtrack of the film.

Thank you very much to all buyers of our store items! Your support has motivated me to continue up to this point.

As already announced in the previous blog entry, here comes the second recommendation for documentaries with a focus on games: the YouTube channel of noclip.

In most of their documentaries noclip explore a game dev studio or a specific game and its history. The protagonists tell the history of the studio or the game and how they have experienced it. Accompanied by many vivid game sequences and video clips, the interested viewer gets a lot of information. The sympathetic founder of noclip and former GameSpot presenter Danny O’Dwyer guides through the documentaries.

The emphasis at noclip is more on the “making of” of the games and the history of the studios, while games.film focuses more on the personalities and emotions of the protagonists. At their core, games.film and noclip make passionate documentaries about computer games and their developers. And another important thing we have in common: we love games. 🙂 Have a look, maybe you”ll like the style of noclip even more.

So far we have published one feature length documentary with space.games.film and several short documentaries. Until we are able to shoot again and actually have the means to make another long film, the question for you might be: what other game documentaries are around? Well, I have two recommendations that are very worthwhile. I’ll introduce the first one in this blog entry and the second one in the next.

Travel and gaming are wonderful topics per se, which can be packed together in documentaries. Cloth Map makes exciting travel documentaries with a focus on gaming. These (if you watch the individual videos per country in one go) medium-length documentaries not only deal with computer games, but also with the respective country, its inhabitants and their gaming culture.

For this, filmmaker Drew Scanlon has already been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the Ukraine, has given an insight into the underground gaming network in Cuba and visited e-sports players in Mongolia. This playlist offers a good overview of his work. Besides his “core films” there are also a lot of other videos like VLOGs and podcasts.

By the way: if you’re looking for easily digestible magazine reports for quick enjoyment about travel & gaming, you’ll find them in IGN’s Fast Travel series.

“Indie Game: The Movie” is a highly acclaimed, Kickstarter financed indie film, which despite its release in 2012, can still be seen as being representative of the emotional ups and downs of indie developers.

The film follows the team Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes during the development and subsequent release of Super Meat Boy, and lone wolf Phil Fish during the development and introduction at Pax of FEZ. Jonathan Blow also talks about his game Braid and what its following success brought about.

What makes the film special is its intimate relationship with the developers it accompanies. It documents not only the development process of the games presented, but also the emotional life of the people behind them. We often witness outbursts of emotion, which range from anger to joy.

Not only the film is highly recommended, but also the commentary track, in which the filmmakers tell many anecdotes from the production period. By the way, the film describes itself as “the first feature documentary film about making video games”. Is that true? Which films do you know, and which ones are older than Indie Game: The Movie?

I also had the opportunity to test out a few games on location in addition to our shooting for the Indie Arena Booth mini-documentary and the space.games.film promotion. Here are my personal favorites:

1. Neo Cab

A mix of Cyberpunkt / Film Noir, which at first caught my I with it looks, but when playing it, it blew me away narratively. As a taxi driver in a neon colored sci-fi world you meet different passengers und get lost more and more fascinating and sometimes bizarre conversations.

2. My Child Lebensborn

The subject matter of the Lebensborn children in Norway is being brought to you in this game in a very sensible and emotional way. You witness the tragic situation of a child, which is being exposed to the prejudice and hostility of its classmates and neighbours. The child, which was fatherd by a Nazi soldier, longs for the truth about its father. As the player you have to take care of this child and also speak out the painful truth. I never thought, that a tabletop/smartphone game could move me like that.

3. Edna & Harvey: The Breakout – 10th Anniversary Edition

What, that old piece? Yes, definitely! This indie game, which 10 years ago was the cornerstone for one of the biggest German developer and publisher. Beautifully remastered Daedalic gets this title out to PC and the current console generation. Besides, creator Jan “Poki” Müller-Michaelis remained faithful and visited the Indie Arena Booth a few times. For me as an old adventure-lover, this is one of the highlights of this years Gamescom.