Inside a modern, but not unfair building, a few hundred meters from the beautiful breast of Riddarfjarden of Stockholm, a frozen glass wall in the office of Josef Fars shows characters carved by it need two, “Toy Story” of his studio in his studio “Toy Story” -esque cooperative adventure. Next to his table, on a light occasion, sitting a pair of boxing gloves of Muhammad Ali.
“I can connect, you know, with someone who is talking about his mind,” Fares said.
In an industry where executives have become united in the marketing of the technology-speaking technology and can be so protected by publicists such as Hollywood stars, prices are distinguished. Many players know the strange designer for his appearance at the Glitzy Game Awards in 2017, when he twice rejected the Oscars with a word of oath before raising his middle finger on the camera.
Feeling could come as a shock from a person who began his artistic career as a moving, including a future autobiographical film set during the Lebanese civil war that was Sweden’s entry for the best international show in Oscars in 2006, but for the past tens of years, the passion of seed has been video games, especially collaborative experiences, Friend or friends.
The fees enjoyed games from the moment he played Pong in a 2600 Atari while living in Beirut; He fell in love in 1988 when he experienced Super Mario Bros. in Stockholm.
After working with some students to make a 2009 game demonstration, the fees were excited. That night he came up with the concept of brothers: a tale of two boys, for sisters and sisters working together in a time of crisis. His interest in films decreased.
“Likes like to fall in love with something I can’t leave,” said Fares, 47. “There is no single day in my life that I don’t think of video games.”
During an era of facial online games, tariffs have shown time and time again that there is still a market for municipal experience. Brothers: A tale of two boys (2013) became an essential part of the Indie game revolution. Hazelight, the studio he later, found immediate success with a way out (2018), a cooperative prison experience, and then sold nearly 23 million copies of it to two (2021).
The newest game of Hazelight, Split Fiction, is a quick rocket trip of scientific fiction, fantasy and collegiality that has received critical praise. During the eight chapters of the game, which can be played online, two brave scribes travel in fantastic, sometimes surreal environments. Seals said there was usually a keyword from which a game thrives. For the brothers, it was “grief”. For fiction divided, it was “friendship”.
Neil Druckmann, the studio director of Naughty Dog, whose loans include Uncharted and The Last of us, called the fees a “high -energy boy” and a “safe artist” who wanted to try things that no one had done. He compared the work of the seed with the making of music.
“There are few, like, a hip-hop for him, you know, where you are taking samples in these ideas,” Druckmann said. “But he is making them his own.”
There are regular nodes for pop culture and the history of games in divided fiction, including “Dune”, Crash Bandicoot and Mario Kart. There is also the “Lord of the Rings” and the legend of Zelda. The list goes on.
In a sequence, the fees are slightly borrowed from the films “Shrek” and “Babe”. As you check a pig flying by passing gas, the colorful confetti, white stars and a rainbow come out of the pig after.
Seed personality is regularly described as “eccentric” or “crazy”, and he even entertains his personality. The video of his Oscar explosion – in which he emphasized how video games are an interactive experience – is an Easter egg in it.
But in a recent video call, fees, wearing a beige sweater, with cable, was reflective. Sitting on a beige bed in the Hazelight office with his feet up in the pillow, he explained how his parents had tried to emigrate to Sweden from Beirut five times before their application was approved.
They were eager to bring their six children to a peaceful environment away from the constant bombing of Lebanon’s civil war, which took 150,000 lives and created one million refugees between 1975 and 1990.
“The first 10 years of my life were very violent and very harsh,” said Fares, who added that the formative experience built its self-assurance.
In 2005, fees documented his childhood in the middle of the war through Zozo, a film describing exploding bombs, apartments that were thrown into the wind and lived eliminated. Odudesically, but effectively, a dull child is friends with a chick he finds on his roof.
Fares himself had a chicken like a pet, a friend with whom he could speak amidst the destruction of the real life he testified. When he left him with older chickens, the bird was attacked and killed. “It was traumatic,” he said, an extremely disturbing moment.
Some of the other seeds of the seed featured his brother, Fares Fares, an actor who continued to appear on the TV series “Tyrant”, “Westworld” and “The Wheel of Time”. And as he did with “Zozo”, also the nickname of the seed, he has placed part of his life in the Hazelight games, sometimes boldly. At the end of the brothers: a tale of two boys, there is an emotional burial.
“I actually bury my younger brother,” said Fars. “He died in his birth. So he was still a child. And for some reason, my sister and I went to bury her. “
It is here that the fees spoke quietly about the need for family and friends. All Hazelight games are cooperative efforts, best played with two people sitting next to each other in bed. The studio tries to balance her desire to challenge a game with her concern for causing many quarrels, and automatic savings points in divided fiction often come.
“We build a super difficult belief between two people,” Fares said. “And then you all of a sudden, you can destroy it and you can have to go against each other. There is something interesting about this to create this kind of tension between the two people.”
Earlier during the day, before work, the fees had taken his two young daughters to school. Now he was preparing to catch them. Mio and Zoe, both characters in fiction, are named after his children, he said, “So I can have them with them even when I am working.” In the game, my Mio is introvert and Zoe is extrovert; Unlike his children, they do not immediately care about each other’s company.
At first, after each voice a concern for the favored genre of writing another, the authors are forced to jump from one space vehicle to another, everyone is under attack. The scene is supported by a scientific sound sound with high tension synthetic by musician Gustav Grefberg, who has scored all the Hazelight Games as well as Wolfenstein: The New Rende.
Grefberg believed in the seed vision as soon as he saw a brothers prototype. “I begged Josef to work with him,” Grefberg said.
He moved from Fea’s excitement and confidence, Grefberg wanted to join a team that had so many new ideas. An annual jam in Hazelight known as “Freaky Week” generates free flow ideas from the whole company with 83 people.
Beyond the intensity of the seed – “When Josef says he wants more action, he says he is almost like an emotional word,” Grefberg said – he is deeply philosophical. Colleagues have had extensive conversations about the understanding of meditation, concepts of zenith and spiritual. This is not to say that the fees have lost his ambition. He can even return to creating movies if he can find time.
“I believe that fiction divided can potentially be a great movie,” he said.
The game has already transferred the audience.