Polygon, an upcoming games journalism website, has released a “teaser” trailer for their documentary Press Reset detailing their founding and early months. Looking at it, I realised precisely how hard it is to pull off something like that – so here’s my pitch for Pixel, which is like Polygon, but better. It’s got details and everything:
[RAIN ON WINDOW. CITY SKYLINE GOES FROM LIGHT TO DARK. SPEEDED-UP CLOUDS ZIP ACROSS SKYLINE]
We’d never met before. We came together to build a website. Not a website. A portal. A portal that lets you understand games in a new way, not like the old ways you understood them, because they’re wrong. They’re all wrong. You’re understanding things wrong. We’re here to fix that.
[MAN UNDERGOES VISIBLY PAINFUL BODY MODIFICATION FOR UNKNOWN REASON]
We have numbers, and we don’t know what we’re doing with the numbers just yet but it’s going to be amazing. You’re going to look at our scores, and where someone might have written an eight at the bottom of a review before, our eights are going to be different. You’re going to look at it and think, wow, this is an entirely different way of looking at eight. This is more eight than the other eights. This is more like a sixteen. Or a twenty four. Maybe, one day, a thirty two. The sky’s the limit.
[FAMILY WALKING AROUND EMPTY HOUSE IN EVENING HALF-LIGHT, TOUCHING WALLS]
We’re putting a lot on this. We’ve brought together the best people in the world to make this happen. Talented people. People you might have heard of. People who are kind of a big deal. People with families and pets and dreams, and if this doesn’t work, they’re – well, they’re in danger.
[MAN SIGNS AN IMPORTANT-LOOKING DOCUMENT]
If this fails, they’re all going to die. We’re going to kill them. We’re going to kill their families, their pets, their dreams. We have a third-party app installed on their phones that can do that. And that’s a scary thing to think about, going forward. That’s a big deal. But, you know, the fear sort of focuses you. And them. It really focuses them.
[SUNSET]
Not all of us are “white hipster dudes.” One of the guys is barely a hipster at all. One of us is a girl. Maybe two. I think.
[NO FOOTAGE OF WOMEN]
We are going to change the way you think about drop-down menus. How about: drop-up menus? See? It’s simple, but it’s radically different. That’s kind of what we’re about.
[SHOT OF COMPUTER WITH TOO MANY WINDOWS OPEN]
Instead of reviews, we have PlayToos. So when you turn on the game, you turn on the PlayToo on your tablet or smartphone and you’ll see one of us commenting on what you’re doing as you’re playing, stuff like “Oh, don’t forget to grab that coin!” or “Quick, shoot that guy!” or just, you know, talking about our day, or out partners, the state of the industry, that sort of thing.
[WOMAN IN CAR TALKS TO CHILD, IGNORES ROAD]
We might comment on the game. We might not. We want to break free of traditional notions of journalism and embrace everything that we do. We’re creative geniuses. The only problem is that people might not be ready for what we’re bringing to the table. Or that the table itself isn’t big enough. Or that there aren’t enough chairs around the table and some of us have to stand.
[ASSEMBLED TEAM WALK THROUGH AMERICAN CITY WITH MOST FAMOUS MEMBER AT FRONT]
Are people ready for this? To be honest, we don’t know. We don’t know if we’re ready, and we’re awesome. We’re the people behind this, and we don’t know if it’s going to work – how exciting is that? How could people not want to get on board a rollercoaster even as it’s being built, to watch the rails being slotted into place as they clatter over them?
[CLOSEUP ON EYE OF WEEPING, SMILING BOY]
We think people might become ready once they see it. We hope they will. Hope is a big word in our lexicon. A really, really massive word.
END
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