Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Andy Serkis says the film industry "could not exist" without games
Games have "come of age", says Lord Of The Rings actor
Ah, well thank heck for that. I thought I'd spent my weekend hunched over a screen in a goblinesque sweat-trance. No! Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 voice actor Andy Serkis: I was simply partaking in some vital culture; a veritable Wildean sophisticate. Film industry folks thought games were "not an art form in any stretch," Serkis told Game Watcher, "and gradually it's taken over the film industry, which could not exist without it." Take that, Roger Ebert's dead wrong dead horse of a dead body.
“I wouldn’t have called myself a gamer at all,” said the Lord Of The Rings actor, who also worked on Enslaved: Odyssey to the West with Alex Garland. "But I was always very interested in next generation storytelling. Around 2004, when we made Heavenly Sword, I started our performance capture studio with a view to create immersive stories outside of traditional 2D experiences, like cinema or television.”
"There used to be a terrible snobbery from the film industry with [videogames] being the lesser cousin,” Serkis said. “That they didn’t really tell stories, it was just about the gameplay, hack ‘n’ slash, and killing people". But games have "come of age" since then, he says. "There are actors coming out of drama schools who want to be in videogames and see it as another part of the palate of what it is to be a performer.”
I assume Serkis is mostly referring to things like the importance of motion capture tech to modern filmmaking, though I'm always a little resistant to the easy gratification offered by these "games are legitimate art now" arguments. Since, you know, they always were and you don't need either filmmakers or actors to tell you that. But also: it's vitally important that no-one ever take a videogame remotely seriously under any circumstances. Please trust me on this. Anyway, here is a fun Guardian interview from 2014, in which Serkis reveals that he was first approached for Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword by his mortgage broker. "He showed me a trailer after we'd discussed mortgage rates and I thought it was fantastic".
As for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 itself, I think I'm probably allowed to tell you that Serkis is very good in the turn-based RPG, as are the entire voice cast, as is…oh, nope, skirting dangerously enclose to the embargo here. I'll have a review up tomorrow morning anyway. You may be able to piece together my feelings by reading my last two "what are we playing?" entries. Eep.