949,710
I’ve never had a video get a million views before, but I’m damn close. In January 2006 I got a call from game industry giant David Perry. (He’s a giant for his accomplishments, but he’s also very tall!) I had sent him a copy of the short film about video game addiction that Michael Highland produced under the AGN brand a year earlier. “As Real As Your Life” was a remake of the student film Michael submitted to the University Of Pennsylvania Film Festival. He won, I found out about it and asked him to send it to me. It blew me away. There was a lot of reading involved so I asked if he wanted to update the film with some narration. He said he was interested in remaking the movie altogether. It was exciting and he was a really smart kid with a ton of talent and passion for computer programming, music, and film.
Michael decided to fly out to Los Angeles from Princeton, New Jersey to work on the film. He would stay at his girlfriends parents house nearby. When I met him, he handed me his storyboards. I was floored. These were professional looking storyboards that had the entire film, every shot detailed and sketched. We spent a few days finding things like an old TV from the 70’s and other supplies. I didn’t know what he was up to, but when he started to put it all together over the next few weeks, I just stood back and watched in awe. He had a vision and was able to execute it flawlessly. After 10 years in production, I was really impressed by what he was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
David loved the film so much, he wanted to make it the centerpiece of his TED Talk later that year. I didn’t know what a TED Talk was, so he explained that some of the brightest people from Technology, Entertainment and Design got together for a weekend of “talks” that could run no more than 18 minutes. You can’t buy tickets unless you’re invited and oh, the tickets were thousands of dollars each.
David was the first person invited to the exclusive conference to talk about video games. He wanted to use an edited down version of “As Real As Your Life”. He also wanted a short video to demonstrate the evolution of videogames from the classic pong to the games of that era. I enlisted the help of my friends at G4. They had built an impressive library of game footage spanning all eras. I was introduced to the creative Rich Dorato, would helped me collect precisely the game capture we needed to tell the story of this evolution.
Both videos we re a big hit at the conference. After Michael’s movie ended with his face in a giant closeup, TED curator and host Chris Anderson said, “That kid just got a free ticket to next years show”
Michael went to the show and met Al Gore and a number of other luminaries. Afterwards, he would be given the opportunity to move to Japan to work on an MMORPG. He spent some time working at That Game Company on their latest hit title Sky: Children Of Light. He’s currently working at BUCK in LA. I also took him to Burning Man, but that’s a story that may never be told.
Now the Evolution video is 14 years old and getting close to hitting one million views. So give it a watch and share it with friends so you can be a part of 1 million and maybe I’ll get some love from YouTube gaming.
