“Perhaps, Arcadeology [2021] be a niche documentary; It was not our intention, something else is what has come out of us ”, he tells us Mario-Paul Martinez about the film, which has been released in Spain and is in negotiations to be distributed on some platform of streaming important after the theatrical release period, about the anonymous fans of recovering arcade machines that made our youth so in love in the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century with their arcade adventures.
That is to say, to themselves, who came to their living rooms to insert one coin after another into the slots of such gadgets and have fun. “We are going to try to make them see it, not only experts or those interested in video games, but also other people so that you understand that passion”, Affirms the Valencian director. Although the niche of the gamers he is already very fat.
Mario-Paul Martínez: “« Arcadeology »is a rebellious son for good”
“When we started the film, we did not know that all this covered such a wide Spanish spectrum and such a difference in levels. It was not the initial project ”, admits Mario-Paul Martínez. “In the beginning, it was going to be a university research thing, which is updated in the page Arcadeologia.es, for which they give a grant to the Massiva group, from the art department that I direct at the Miguel Hernández University in Elche ”.
“We try catalog, through Arcade Vintage, all machines and repair processes that they were carrying out ”, he continues,“ to make a repository on-line of arcades as they were at the time, and now we will carry about thirty-five or forty, and we have ten more ready. We are doing a dozen each year and we are uploading them ”.
The audiovisual documentation of the investigation resulted in Arcadeology because they saw that it could become “a very powerful documentary” about this area of arcade video games: “It was a small part of the project and, then, the son rebelled against us and went his way. But this son is a rebel for the better, ”says Mario-Paul Martínez.
“And, of course, having studied the real machines from the inside and having them explain the processes helped us to better structure what would be in the movie. As we also come from the audiovisual field and do other productions, each time we got more into the subject, we were passionate about it and we wanted to show it like this ”. Why “If we do not attend to the legacy of videogames, we can lose it; and there are people who are already doing it and we must know it ”.
Bringing out the reclaimers of arcade machines
The structure of Arcadeology it is circular: it starts where it ends. “We wanted to say something with that”, Mario-Paul Martínez acknowledges: “that these people, whatever happens, charging or not charging, altruistically or not, follow their move, repairing machines, and I thought it was very nice and commendable . When we met them they were, in a good way, in the shadows; no one knew they were there, repairing machines. What was known is that there was a room where they had recreational facilities because of nostalgia: people wanted to play ”.
“But, when I found out that they were trying to reproduce the original machine, as it was”, he continues, “with its original furniture, its plates, etc., working on it for three years until getting the game as at the time, I said:« ¿¿ Do you know what you are doing here? This is more important. It is a work of playful-industrial archeology almost. This is like being, saving the distances, restoring a Gothic altarpiece in the back of the Prado. You are going to offer something that has been requested, and you are also going to let them play with it »”.
The filmmaker behind Arcadeology delves into the motivations of these people: “They are passionate about the arcade and they care about maintaining that cultural heritage; each one, for their reasons: some, out of sheer nostalgia, because they want to transmit this to their children; others, because they want to challenge the board and get, through reverse engineering, coating and emulation, start that game from there. And everyone are helping to preserve the video game, And that’s great”.
The possible jump to a television series of ‘Arcadeology’
So Mario-Paul Martínez and his team try to “give a perspective” on the matter. “Because covering all this is impossible,” he clarifies. “We have material to do a series, and I am very sad that many takes and many participants could not fit in the film because we didn’t have footage for it. And we were going to meet Bruno Sol, who directs Retro gamer in Spain, the most important retro arcade and video game magazine, and in the end we couldn’t because covid-19 was crossed. But then we said, ‘What for? If we don’t have footage to put him in, ”and it seems like an injustice to us.
And the fact is that there are platforms streaming that they have been suggested to expand Arcadeology to series because they have plenty of interesting material. “They have proposed it to us, and maybe they have. We are thinking about it ”, Mario-Paul Martínez reveals to us without discovering what platforms it is. “Above all, for continuing to explore and for the people who have been left out.”
The National Library and the antecedent of ‘pinballs’
The documentary “started cooking in 2018 with the university project and got very on track in 2019 ”. But the happy covid-19 pandemic, like the activities of the whole world, “hit a tremendous braking”. If not, we would have seen Arcadeology long before. “We hadn’t finished very significant shootings for us; among them, the one who was already beginning to agree with the National Library of Spain”, Mario-Paul Martínez tells us.
“For us it was very important that he go out because the project they have just started legitimizes one of the demands of this documentary: that an official institution of that caliber was finally interested, in a reliable way, in the preservation of the video game ”. And he concludes: “It is one of the culmination, and we hope that the skeptical public, not understood perhaps in video games, will also be influenced. We believed that this was very relevant to the didactic aspect of the documentary itself ”.
On the other hand, “they did not want to leave the arcade because it would have been another movie, but they drop it quickly, and the theme of the pinballs”. And it is that “that brushstroke was important to talk about them in Arcadeology because it was the beginning of the retro and video game conservation associations. All its members told them that this appeared before with the pinballs and that their associations were the first in Spain that began to recover machines. And everything has happened there, from a certain volume of business to important events around the pinball, which later, obviously, was extrapolated to the passion for the arcade ”.
The difficulties of filming and post-production of ‘Arcadeology’
“The filming has been very hard”, Confesses Mario-Paul Martínez. “It has involved a lot of trips, missing weekends, some without their families or without their girlfriends, and working permanently because we already do it at university. And, after two and a half years, you are faced with the worst that can be: The editing room and gigabytes and gigabytes of recordings”.
The problem is that “a documentary is very different from other films. The actors know everything they have to say well and everything is very limited. With a good storyboard, you follow it and it works. But this is organic; You never know what the interviewee is going to tell you, where he is going to go, and it has to come together with two and a half years of contributions from other people ”. The difficulty to Arcadeology it was so much that, “andn the first montage, they left two and a quarter hours, and the producer [Miguel Herrero] It almost killed him: ‘Are you crazy? This is impossible””.
“They helped me a lot to select, to remove; even if It’s your vision, your baby, and you don’t want to rip her arms off”, Says Mario-Paul Martínez with a laugh. “You are asking the opinion of people who know about movies and video games and are close. But, of course, you remove Gaelco: «If this is pure history!». His people had to leave because that is how we have broken some molds. And you have a very bad time because you have ethical debts because, for example, this person who behaved so well with me, received me and granted me an interview and now I cannot get it out, I have called her personally to ask for forgiveness. So we need to see that this has results. Right now we are very happy, and this gives you the impetus to take on new projects ”.
The experience of the first film
The first feature “It is very hard, but it hooks, it is pure adrenaline. It’s like your first interview: you want more and more. You complain but of vice ”. Y Arcadeology it constitutes a logical consequence: “We come from the fine arts; I’m an illustrator but I’ve always been connected to cinema, doing post-production and that kind of thing; and for me it is very natural to tell something through images. I’ve had a great time listening to people, but also putting the camera into the bowels of a machine, following David Martínez as he travels [la redacción de] Hobby Consoles… ”
“As much as possible it is a lot of fun,” continues Mario-Paul Martínez. “And, having also done fictional things, I really like the documentary genre which, for better or for worse, is something to improvise. It is a challenge. You are here and you have two hours, to see how you do it so as not to do something that everyone has seen, and I love that ”.