Sometimes, newer isn’t always better.  Ask anyone who prefers a record to a CD, or a black and white suspense film to a modern action flick.  There’s a certain appeal to nostalgia that you can’t deny.  It brings you back to a different era, where things were often simpler and “had more heart.”  Likewise, there are many that would rather play Bubble Bobble than Splinter Cell.  I know that’s blasphemy to some, but I kid you not.

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Yeah, yeah, I get it, The Dark Knight is going to blow my mind.  In the meantime, another tale of unlikely heroism has got my attention.  A gritty, in-depth story of the lives of professional gamers, from the current stars to the dark horses to the fresh faces, Frag will, no doubt, itself blow a few minds.

Meet Mike Pasley, film artist and Director of Frag, and Judd Saul, Director of Photography with Cohesion Productions and the Executive Producer of Frag.

How did the idea for Frag come about?
Judd: Well, we’re a film and video production company, and we wanted to do a documentary, and we were going through, “What do we like to do? What really needs to be covered?” We were watching TV, and we noticed that professional video gaming was getting more recognition, and we were like, this is it. This is a documentary that we need to do. I think this is a story that needs to be told that we could accomplish.

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There are a slew of reasons we’re excited about going to the LA Games Conference next week, but one I hadn’t even considered was the possibility of playing games with celebrities. Ned Sherman, CEO and publisher of Digital Media Wire, which organizes and runs the conference, planted this dreamy seed in my mind on Monday when he told the story of Vin Diesel wandering into the 2006 event: “That was pretty wild, totally unplanned and unanticipated. We were hosting a gamers’ tournament and this event was being done at the Pacific Design center…so it was our first LA Games Conference event, and all of a sudden he just walks into the room and says, ‘I hear you guys are playing games out here, can I play?’ and he sat down and played games for an hour or two.”

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Fans of some of this year’s most uncommonly popular titles—Professor Layton, Zack & Wiki, and the continued Phoenix Wright series (of course)—may have forgotten where these and many other games originally derive from: the classic Adventure genre, whether text-based, graphical, or point ‘n’ click. This September will bring a very welcome reminder to gamers nationwide, with the Adventure Gaming Expo in Atlantic City.
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