Is Digital Eclipse’s Gold Masters Series the future of video game documentaries?
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On August 29, Digital Eclipse launched the Gold Masters Series, which aims to explore the history of video games through the interactive documentary format.
The first release, The Making of Karateka, feels like the culmination of what the American studio has done in the past decade, integrating many features that had a 'trial run' in previous productions like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Which makes sense, considering it took quite some time to go from the initial idea to the actual realization of it.
"When I arrived at the company in 2020," editorial director Chris Kohler told us, "Karateka had been signed and the concept of the Gold Masters Series was already there. But the concept kind of goes back to the relaunch of the Digital Eclipse brand back in 2015."
"Karateka is the prototype of Prince of Persia. It's a very important game and it's a story we that really wanted to tell"
According to Kohler, the idea was to pick out landmark games, series, studios or even just stories about games and then "do essentially independently produced versions of the work Digital Eclipse was already doing." The independent nature of the project is very significant, because it gives more freedom to a studio that is used to dealing with big publishers and their constraints.
"So many of the Digital Eclipse projects start when a publisher comes to us, because they want to do a certain game collection," Kohler explains. "Or sometimes we go to publishers and pitch ideas."
In this case, however, the studio wanted to flip the script, license the game and do exactly what they wanted to do.
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