Steven Spielberg will always be best-known for his movies, but the legendary director also has considerable history with the games industry. Early LucasArts employees recall him phoning up for solutions when he got stuck on their classic adventure games, and after the experience of filming Saving Private Ryan Spielberg was inspired to create a game, and wrote the first in what became the Medal of Honor series. Further dalliances included EA’s Boom Blox, an excellent Wii title that’s well worth seeking out, and another title so overweeningly ambitious (codenamed LMNO) it never got past the prototype stage.
You could draw a straight line through all this stuff to his adaptation of Ready Player One, and so it’s probably no surprise that the great man has passed some of his passion for the medium onto his kids. Spielberg’s eldest son, Max, has had a career straddling both film and games, including credits on games like Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and is the co-founder and creative director of developer Fuzzybot.
In a new interview with Minnmax, Spielberg’s son discusses their upcoming title Lynked: Banner of the Spark, and in the process talks a little about what his old man gets up to.
“He loves gaming, he’s the one that got me into it,” says Max Spielberg. “He plays games, he’s a big PC gamer and so that’s kind of our bonding point as well. He’s like ‘hey what’s good, what new Call of Duty should I be playing, send me a list of the top five shooters, I’ll get ’em downloaded and we can play ’em together when you come over to the house.'”
Given Papa Spielberg’s involvement with Medal of Honor, and that clear interest in creating cinematic-style war experiences in games, that’s perhaps not surprising. But Spielberg really seems to love this series. Max is asked whether he ever scores a big win in his recommendations, and the answer is simple.
“It’s always a Call of Duty,” laughs Max Spielberg, “he loves Call of Duty, he enjoys the campaign. He’s big into story games and I’m always trying to get him to play Uncharted, y’know ‘it’s Indiana Jones, you’d appreciate this’, and he’s always ‘I can’t do controllers, I only do keyboard and mouse.'”
So: one of us, one of us, one of us.
Max recalls showing Lynked to his dad, recollecting with some amusement the recoil when he produced a controller for it. “He also plays a lot of mobile games, he’s big into Golf Clash and stuff like that, anything he can play on the side: ‘Is your game coming to mobile?'”
So Spielberg is not just a PC gamer, but a PC purist. Unfortunately young Max was not asked what kind of rig his dad’s rocking, because you’d imagine it has to be a Covenant-level face-melting setup, nor what Spielberg senior thinks of Call of Duty’s recent history of remaking its own campaigns to varying degrees of success. It does make you realize, though, that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle may well have one very interested player: as long as the mouse and keyboard controls are up to scratch.
