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| Joe Granato IV |
"new game for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System."
The game and the film may be pre-ordered from:
www.TheNew8bitHeroes.com
Josh tells us that, "[u]pon a visit to his former home in Central New York, Granato discovered a box of sentimental artifacts. Among them were forgotten illustrations, designed by he and other eight-year-old neighborhood friends, of concepts for a video game for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. After reveling in nostalgia, he decided... to realize those ambitions..." using "the same techniques" with "the same limitations that would have been employed in 1988 to make a new cartridge based game that would actually be playable on the now archaic hardware for which it was originally intended."
With a "team of modern creatives," Joe embarked on a "journey into an esoteric subculture made up of devotees to this as an art form" - people "who thrive on the art of limitation."
The film features Adam F. Goldberg (creator of ABC’s "The Goldbergs"), Piers Anthony (bestselling fantasy novelist and creator of Xanth), David Sardy (Grammy Award winning producer and composer of soundtracks for Zombieland, Premium Rush, AND End of Watch), Howard Phillips (creator of Nintendo Power Magazine), Samuel Claiborn (Managing Editor, IGN [International Gaming News]), James Rolfe (Director, "Angry Video Game Nerd"), and David Markey (Director, 1991: The Year Punk Broke).
La Libertad: Where were you born?
Joe: I was born in central New York, and grew up in a little suburban town just outside of Utica.
La Libertad: Where do you currently reside?
Joe: I currently live in Sarasota, Florida.
La Libertad: What would you like to tell our readers about your new film "The New 8-bit Heroes"?
Joe: The New 8-bit Heroes follows a group of modern creatives
The film's E.P. [Executive Producer] was Adam F. Goldberg, creator of ABC's "The Goldbergs," features prominent members in the game development world, and has been received incredibly well thus far.
The project has also led to the creation of development tools for the N.E.S. [Nintendo Entertainment System], which will allow the average person, even one with zero programming experience, to create real, cartridge based games for the N.E.S., which we will be launching a crowdfunding campaign for in the near future.
La Libertad: What do you love most about directing?
Joe: Directing film in general has always occurred to me as the best illustration of controlled chaos. There are infinite variables that serve as the complex mechanism behind what is eventually a fairly simple sensory experience, comparatively. I love how the output medium always hides the strings so well, and how the narrative can end up conveying so much more than the sum of its many complex parts. For instance, we carved The New 8-bit Heroes out of seven terabytes of D.S.L.R. [Digital Single-Lens Reflex] footage captured over the span of two years, all without much of a road map. Yet, in organizing the footage in post [post-production], a very distinct narrative emerged that seems obvious and inevitable. The fact that the end product of such a convoluted process - the fact that any film can come across as having any semblance of sense is probably the most intriguing thing to me as a filmmaker, and makes it a really compelling method by which to tell a story.
La Libertad: How did you become interested in video games?
Joe: I’ve always been interested in gaming. It’s almost redundant to say. I grew up in the Eighties. I think beating the Legend of Zelda was a rite of passage to enter the Third Grade. But I was a little obsessed. I was the quintessential Nintendo Kid. I had every issue of Nintendo Power magazines; I had all the peripherals; I was the neighborhood guru. In fact, the first time that I was ever called on the phone by a girl I had a crush on, it was to ask for my guidance in beating Zelda II. But, unlike a lot of my friends, playing those early video games wasn’t a passive experience for me. Exploring those pixelated worlds unlocked my creative ambition. The games compelled me to make music, to draw, to write... In the thirty years that followed, I became a novelist. I became a filmmaker. I became a musician. I became a programmer. And I honestly attribute a lot of my passion for these things to the experiences I had playing those early Nintendo games.
La Libertad: What inspires you?
Joe: What inspires me, besides the rather nebulous answers like life or travel or unexpected experiences? Well, if I were to find a nexus at the center of my creative pursuits of various types of media, one thing that is a constant source of inspiration is the seemingly futile nature of the creative process. I’ve often imagined Muse to be a sadist or a symbiotic parasite rather than a friend or creative guide, and I think some level of sarcastic analysis of that has permeated a lot of my work. Case and [sic] point, The New 8-bit Heroes examines the insane and seemingly thankless culture of toiling for years to create new gaming experiences for consoles that have been obsolete for thirty years.
La Libertad: What is the hardest part of film making?
Joe: The hardest part of any creative project I’ve ever been involved with is relinquishing control and establishing a level of dependency on others. It only takes being burned a few times in this way to exponentially increase how difficult it is to put that level of trust in others who, by nature, are probably not as invested in the project as you. And yet, since not many films can be created alone, it’s a mandatory part of the process. You, as a filmmaker, have to empathically compare the conviction and compulsion for something that may be relevant on a personal level while it’s incubating in the idea stage, and that can be very challenging. And maintaining that interest and personal investment over the course of long form projects despite the complexities of daily life and all of the joyless, mundane parts of the process is always difficult as well.
La Libertad: Where have you traveled?
Joe: The New 8-bit Heroes took us to pretty much every pocket of the continental U.S., and a few stray sequences were also filmed internationally.
La Libertad: What are your overall career goals?
Joe: I’d like to continue to be as agile as I’ve been fortunate enough to be for the last few years. I like the freedom to be able to express through different mediums, as the conventions of the mediums and the way projects are experienced serve very different creative purposes. Some stories work best as prose, while others function better as interactive experiences. Sometimes a three minute piano melody says more than a two hour, blockbuster film. Sometimes the visual stimulus is transportive in a way that no other medium could hope to be. So as far as career goals, I’d like to be in a position where I can continue to pursue any and all of these, dependent upon where "sadistic Muse" leads.
La Libertad: What projects are you working on next?
Joe: Actually, the next project is tangentially related to The New 8-bit Heroes documentary, and the Mystic Searches N.E.S. game that was created as part of it. Over the course of the project, we were forced to develop tools to create our new N.E.S. game. After showing them off, we found that many people were interested in these tools and have decided to make a suite of N.E.S. development tools that will be available to the public so that others can make their own cartridge based games without spending multiple years of primer getting used to the language syntax and the console’s limitations and all the prohibitive elements of working with
La Libertad: What would you like to tell our readers about the details of the October 20th screening in Los Angeles?
Joe: We’re very happy to return to L.A. on our way up to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. The film will be playing at The Landmark Regent Theater at 1045 Broxton Avenue in Westwood. Prior to the screening, we will be demoing parts of the game, the N.E.S. development tool, and having an informal meet and greet and Q and A, and this all will start around 7 p.m., with the movie beginning at 8.
La Libertad: What links would you like to share?
Joe: A lot of information can be found at our main site, which is
www.TheNew8bitHeroes.com
For Facebook users:
Facebook.com/TheNew8bitHeroes
And for Twitter:
https://twitter.com/new8bitheroes
La Libertad: What else, if anything, would you like to tell our readers?
Joe: This project has been very involved. It’s a game; it’s tools
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| Joe Granato IV |
Introduction by Josh Mitchell and
William Mortensen Vaughan
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