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From Digital Press (www.digitpress.com):
Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade - A Review
Last Friday, I went to a screening at the Sundance film
festival of the movie Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade.
The movie is a documentary focuses on Twin Galaxies, an arcade
located in the small town of Ottumwa Iowa, and the video game
champions that came there in 1982. The men and boys that arrived
were the best of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berzerk, and many other
classic arcade games. The movie follows their lives from the Life
Magazine feature on them in 1982 to the present.
The movie mixes the historical and the personal. It briefly
touches on how video games became popular and then focuses on the
bigger games of the early 80s. It has interviews with the players
that had high scores in those games and why they played them and
what their strategies were. It also follows the huge events of
the time, including Buckner and Garcia's "Pac-Man
Fever", the 1982 Video Game world championship filmed by
ABC's "That's Incredible", to the attempt to create a
league of professional video game players, to the mass closing of
arcades just a few years later.
The movie then focuses on several of the video game champions who
were at Twin Galaxies in 1982. These people are asked what
happened to them, how did being great at video games affect their
lives, and what lessons did they learn. These characters are
extremely colorful, such as Billy Mitchell, Rob Mruczek, and Roy
Shildt. Perhaps most interesting is Walter Day, founder of Twin
Galaxies. He definitely comes from the 1960s Berkeley culture,
has had a variety of interests in hobbies in his life, and most
impressively, after establishing Twin Galaxies as the authority
in video game high scores has a keen insight into the importance
of video game history and how it should be preserved.
Chasing Ghosts decides to take a very light approach to the
subject matter. It plays up the fun, funny, and wacky side of
video games and video gamers. It really takes you back to your
childhood when you felt anything was possible and you could be an
astronaut, or president, or a world famous video game player.
This approach really works, because even though there are serious
storylines touched on, the people in this film were doing it for
their love of the game and that comes through. At one point in
the movie, I was worried that the movie was focus too much on the
bizarreness and social awkwardness of the characters, just
playing on the easy stereotype that video game players are
hopeless nerds. This feeling was soon allayed by showing that
these people, despite any quirks, still have families that they
love, friends that they cherish, and ideals they pursue.
The film was very well done and very well put together. The film
mixed interviews, news footage, old photos, and computer-created
rendering of the old video games to always have something on
screen to catch your eye. The documentary created its stories
well, did a good job of showing the impact of video games on
these people and the world, and left you a little sad at the
death of arcades.
While I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the history of
video games, I was born in 1979 and so I missed quite a lot of
the arcade culture, only hitting the tail end of the classic
arcade culture in my childhood before the tournament fighting
games took over. Thus, I learned a lot about what arcades were
like during the early 80s and gained a better appreciations for
the video games I already loved like Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.
I saw seven different movies at the Sundance Film Festival this
year and, unlike most years, I enjoyed all of them. This one,
though, is probably my favorite. No other movie kept me as rapt
or as entertained as Chasing Ghosts and I would rate it a 4.5 out
of 5. Anyone who appreciates a good historical and personal
documentary will enjoy this film and for anyone who is interested
in the history of video games it is a must see.
What made the experience even better is that the producer,
director, editor, cinematographer, and Twin Galaxies founder
Walter Day were there at the screening and stayed around
afterwards to answer questions about the film. The people who
made the film, while not hardcore gamers, really showed that they
were eager to make this film. Mr. Day was a mini-celebrity and
fielded many questions and handled them all well.
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