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The Angry Video Game Nerd Goes from Web Series to Film
Talk to an independent filmmaker these tales and at some point in the conversation you’ll find out they are working on a web series. (Or, at least that’s been the case for me when I bumped into a recent 25 New Face here in New York and a filmmaker colleague in San Francisco last week.) But the web series/feature film continuum can work in reverse too. “The Angry Video Game Nerd” web series has been covering the world of video games since 2006, with its host Cinemassacre YouTube channel having almost 1.5 million subscribers. For the last two years, AVGN creator and star James Rolfe has been at work on The Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, and he expects it to be complete by the end of the year.
In the video above, Rolfe explains the movie’s premise: his web series characters is on the hunt for the world’s worst video game — E.T., published on the Atari 2600. As the story goes, upon the game’s commercial failure in 1982, millions of unsold copies were buried in the New Mexico desert in what has become known as “the Atari landfill.” (As the link reveals, this part is actually true.) The search for that burial ground is expanded by Rolfe into a VFX-fueled action adventure picture, with miniatures, green screen, explosives and production values that seem slick in a high-end B-movie kind of way. “Filmmaking is something you do just because you’re obsessed,” says Rolfe in the video. Check out the extent of that obsession in Rolfe’s update to fans, above.
