There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!”
Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war.
Twenty years, five feature films and three video games later, Zozo was just one of many cathartic endeavours for Fares. “I’ve always been a storyteller,” he says. “When I was young, I’d draw my own comics. The first time I got a camera I borrowed it from a friend’s father, and that was that.” With no formal training, he learned by doing. “I started to make my own movies in the early 90s … and I just kept creating. I made 50 short movies until I did my first feature. So there was a lot of trial and error – just doing, doing, doing, doing until I got it right.”
It’s this DIY, inquisitive approach that guided Fares towards game-making, his pivot into interactive entertainment born from that same unflappable curiosity. “I’ve always been a huge gamer,” Fares says. “ I was lucky. I had the first [console] in Lebanon, an Atari. I played Pong and I was like, wow! I was just utterly fascinated with it. Games have always been my first love.”
Once Fares finished work on his fifth feature film, a friend encouraged him to pursue his love of games, and convinced him to participate in a student-led game jam. “I was so excited! I came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons the same night” Fares says. “ I couldn’t sleep that night because I was like, I want to do this! I came up with how you control the two brothers, how it feels to play, everything. All in that same night.” He soon took his evolving prototype to a respected game studio in Stockholm – Starbreeze. “They were like, ‘Well, maybe you can do this as a kind of test project.’ But I’m like, fuck a test, I’m going to do the whole thing!”
That passion fuelled a year and a half of intense work, with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons being released in 2013. The co-op adventure about siblings embarking on a dangerous journey to find a cure for their sick father has now sold over 10m copies. Despite its success, many in Sweden were baffled by his artistic pivot, a transition for Fares that felt natural. “With movies, I came to a point where I felt that the passion really wasn’t there. Passion lead me to video games. It was very challenging being new in the industry and coming in with a different approach – wanting to create new mechanics. Today it’s different because [people] listen to me, but it was very hard in the beginning.”
After Brothers’ success, Fares started his own gaming studio, Hazelight – a team focused on making story-driven co-op games, a surprisingly rare proposition in our online age. “Hazelight started because me and a friend tried – and failed – to find a game where it’s not just drop-in, drop-out [co-op] but something that you can play together and share a story experience. We couldn’t believe that no one was doing this. It’s why we don’t just make games with a split-screen element at Hazelight – all our games are designed and written right from the beginning to be co-op.”
Much like Hideo Kojima, Fares can’t code, but instead assumes the role of writer and director on his games, laying out the vision for the story and gameplay mechanics, entrusting his talented team to bring his vision to life.
Fast forward 12 years, and a new Hazelight game is now a massive event. Fares’ most recent release was the colourful co-op platformer It Takes Two, about two parents who find themselves magically miniaturised and must fight through their home to reach their young daughter. Highly acclaimed by critics, it won game of the year at the 2021 Game Awards. Now Fares is previewing his latest co-op extravaganza, Split Fiction. Much like Hazelight’s previous work, it’s a thrill ride of exhilarating successive set pieces. As dual protagonists Mio and Zoe battle their way across hostile re-creations of their own sci-fi and fantasy novels, each level throws new ideas at the player with Nintendo-esque abandon.
“Variation and pacing – how things shift all the time, I think that comes from my movie background,” Fares says. “Other people say, ‘If you have this crazy scene, why do you only use it for 10 minutes?’ Because if you have a cool scene in a movie, you don’t repeat it just because it’s cool and costs a lot of money!”
Despite his undeniable talent for storytelling, Fares says he finds interactive narratives far more difficult to construct than their Hollywood counterparts. “It’s way harder to make games, because games are interactive and movies are passive. Movies spend much longer in production, writing, everything too – they just have more time for you to figure it all out. I always joke that if I want to go on vacation, I’m going to make a movie.”
“I believe that we’re still figuring out how to actually tell a story in games,” he continues. “But that’s the fun part! Even the movie industry is now realising that great shit is happening in video games.”
What Fares finds less fun, however, is the direction in which the games industry has been heading in recent years. “I don’t like live service games – I think that they’re bad for the industry,” he says. “I understand that money is important, and that we live in a capitalist society, but creativity and money have to meet somewhere in the middle. It can’t be either too much creativity or too much money. We should focus on pushing our medium forward: no micro transactions, no bullshit, just pure gaming love – because, ultimately, great games will do well.”
