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My Top 10 Game Informer Videos Of 2014
My biggest fear in life is developing even an ounce of self-esteem or ego, so these lists always freak me out since they could be perceived as "Look at all this cool stuff I did!" More than anything, it's a nice motivator to make sure that I produce content every year that tops or at least matches previous years at Game Informer. If you're interested in the history lesson at this point, feel free to check out my "top ten" lists from 2013, 2012, and 2011. 2014 was an odd year. We lost Dan "Everybody look at me" Ryckert and video editor Jason Oestreicher to some weird radical sect of a website, but late in the year we also gained a new video editor named Wade. I still spend a vast majority of my time visiting studios for our cover story trips and then editing interviews and features with developers, but I'd always love to shoot more fun stuff around the office since it feels more connected to the community. Not including Replay or Test Chamber episodes, check out the list below to watch some of my favorite videos from this year!
10. Inside The Development History Of Fortnite
We were able to play hours of Fortnite earlier this year while on the trip for the cover story and I had a lot of silly fun with it. I'm looking forward to playing it with a group of friends eventually, but God only knows what's happening with the release of this game. In an attempt to shine a little light on the game's long and mysterious development up until this point, I produced this video that dove into the history of the project. While it wasn't able to include as many early pieces of concept art or gameplay footage as I would have preferred, I like this video because I was able to use so much raw footage from our Gears of War: Judgment cover story trip years ago. It's a good lesson to try and preserve and store as much raw footage as you can, you never know when you might need a clip of Cliffy B. walking out of a door. Also, I was able to incorporate a snippet of an interview with Rod Fergusson before he left the studio and a sliver of an episode of the Game Informer podcast where we all discuss what the hell was going on over at Epic during its turbulent, turn-over filled month or so.
9. Behind The Music Of Batman: Arkham Knight
One of the sad truths I've had to embrace when producing video content to go alongside our cover stories is that video features on the music or audio in a game never pull in much of an audience. I love the soundtracks to Rocksteady's Batman games, so I was really excited to interview their composer Nick Arundel while visiting the studio in London. It turned out that he was the nicest person I've ever spoken with on camera. I don't think I shot the interview very well and we couldn't get the audio from his keyboard routed through my camera's input like we wanted (he crawled under his desk for a while to futz with the XLR cables) but I'm happy that his personality comes through so well in the finished video.
8. Just Cause 3's Mission To Kickstart New York
Prior to shooting this video while on the Just Cause 3 cover story, I had been watching a lot of the Foo Fighters HBO series Sonic Highways so the idea of creating a video feature centering around one city was exciting to me. It's a bit more business-ish than maybe a lot of people would prefer for video game content, but I'm interesting in that crap so I'm sorry. Also, the video allowed me to slip in a Woody Allen reference with the great Super Mercato Bros. supplying the music. Bryan Vore and Ben Reeves were also on the cover story trip, and I had a good time exploring New York with them and stopping every couple of blocks to shoot more poor man's b-roll with my iPhone.
7. Why Is Square's Cloud Gaming Company Named Shinra?
When Square Enix announced that their cloud gaming service was going to be called Shinra Technologies and that they were partnering with a studio named Avalanche, my Final Fantasy VII-loving mind exploded. Luck would have it that shortly after the announcement I was going to be visiting their "headquarters" with the Just Cause 3 cover story trip. The vice president of the company was nice enough to sit down with me and joke around for a while about how absurd their name is, the video really bombed views-wise but I still think it's dumb fun.
6. Take A Video Tour Of E3 2014
These E3 tours always seem to make this list, which is odd because every year when we're filming then they seem like the biggest unusable cluster-f imaginable. This year's tour was particularly difficult due to scheduling hours out of two editors' day to walk around and make jokes. We had to swap out Tim Turi for Jeff Cork at a certain point and I'm pretty happy with the stupid hand-slapping lore we created to do it. This tour in particular had some weird pacing issues with the edits and it gets a bit chaotic, but I hope it's all excused by the limited time I have at E3 to edit and post these things.
5. Tim And Dan's Full Impressions Of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes
I shot a lot of videos in Japan this year since I went there for two cover stories and also swung by TGS, I love the country and I think it's fun to show the editors outside of their native habitat. Studying all things Metal Gear Solid in preparation for our cover story trip to Japan for Metal Gear Solid V was one of the nerdiest and most fulfilling things I've done at this job. I love the series, so scouring Big Boss wikis and trying to boil everything down to create the best possible set of questions for our limited time with Hideo Kojima was a blast. We recorded the video above on our last day in Japan after a long night of singing Snake Eater in a karaoke bar, I'm very happy that Dan in particular was able to hold himself together while shooting this since he wasn't in great shape that day. NeoGAF and the rest of the gaming internet exploded with rage and confused speculation when the news broke from our cover story about how quickly a player can finish the story mission in Ground Zeroes, but it was incredibly frustrating when people didn't stumble across this video that painted a pretty fair overall assessment of the pros and cons of the Ground Zeroes package from the two Metal Gear fans that had actually played the game multiple times.
4. Does the Public Know Who Develops Call of Duty?
Ah, Ben Reeves hitting the street. These videos are exhausting to shoot and you feel drained after hours and hours of lugging video equipment around and begging strangers to appear on camera and then watching them be more than confused about what the hell Reeves is talking about. The finished products are always fun though and I'd love to shoot more stuff like this once Minnesota warms up a bit. I thought that the video above was a fun way to close out our month of coverage on Sledgehammer's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and I'm still proud of these street-comedy videos for being so wildly odd.
3. The History Of Turtle Rock Studios
I love visiting game studios, if only to compare the atmosphere and mood of each of them. I'm really excited for Evolve and Turtle Rock Studios felt like a small studio with the leadership at the top still working in the trenches and not being particularly comfortable on camera or talking to the press yet. I think the video above captures the ups and downs of the studio pretty well and I appreciated the heads of the studio sitting down with me for such an extended period to discuss their entire history and their bizarre relationship with Valve. I also like that a video about a game studio's history can include footage of a lizard and work-in-progress hot rods.
2. Sean Murray Meets Ted Price
I always love matching up developers at E3 that have some connection but haven't met yet, they always prove to be some of my favorite videos of the year. This time around I matched up Greg Kasavin (Transistor) and Richard Garriott (Ultima) with a splash of Felicia Day somehow and the creators of Tetris with the co-creator of Threes, but my favorite match was Sean Murray from Hello Games and Insomniac's Ted Price. I reached out to Sean and asked him who he would like to speak with if he had the chance, Cliffy B. passed and so the honor was brought to Ted Price. I didn't expect Price to be on board, but thanks to the incredibly nice folks at Insomniac we were able to line this meeting up at the end of the show. We shot this in the hotel room where Hello Games was showing off No Man's Sky right after all of Game Informer was in there for their coverage appointment. I think the video above is an interesting moment to capture as one of the industry's most-seasoned veterans sits down with Sean Murray who was attending his first E3 with the ambitious No Man's Sky.
1. Gilbert Gottfried Voices Our Favorite Games
This video was bizarre, I can't believe all of the pieces lined up to make this thing happen. It all started with Tim Turi noting that Gilbert Gottfried was going to be attending the Minneapolis comic-con, and (since we're all children of the 90s) Dan Ryckert and I were praying that Tim's e-mail to Gottfried's "people" wouldn't be ignored. Once his agent or whatever tentatively agreed to shooting a quick video (they were hoping there'd be money involved), the three of us spitballed ideas about what lines from games he should voice. Originally the plan was to have him voice a ton of Navi's lines from Ocarina of Time and keep everything focused to just one title but then Tim grew more and more tempted to include lines from Resident Evil 1. Eventually we broadened the scope of the video and had a blast coming up with the funniest potential lines to have him read, I'm still upset that we didn't ask him to record Ellie's final "Okay" from The Last of Us. We were out at a bar the night before the convention, all fairly certain that this potential video was going to fall through, when Tim received a personal call on his cell phone from Gilbert Gottfried asking for more information on what we had in mind. We met him at the convention and he seemed polite but very passive about lining up a time to shoot this thing, we eventually had to corner him as he walked out the back door after his panel. It was a surreal experience to have Tim feeding him these game lines, and once it was done and he walked out of the small side room at the convention center the three of us high-fived each other until our hands bled. I'm glad the internet enjoyed it so much when we released the video, I saw plenty of people saying that they wanted the clean audio of him saying Fus-Ro-Dah for a potential Skyrim mod but nobody ever contacted me directly about it. I still have the clean audio, so if you have any interest in making any sort of Gottfried mod, please send me an e-mail at hanson@gameinformer.com.
I'd love your feedback in general on our site's video content, so please feel free to send me an e-mail at hanson@gameinformer.com or contact me on Twitter, I'm @yozetty. Let me know what you love, hate, or want to see more of in the future. Just in case you're looking for more content to watch, here's a list of honorable mentions that didn't make the cut.
Dan's Emotional Farewell Montage
Batman: Arkham Knight's Creative Director On Why They're Leaving Batman Behind
Behind Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's Audio
Inside Massive Chalice's Open Development
Behind The Procedural-Generation Technology of No Mans Sky
Inside Resident Evil's Twelve Years of Changes
Take a Tour of TGS 2014 With Tim Turi
Creating the Gameplay of Assassin's Creed Unity, featuring Steven Spielberg's son!
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