LOS ANGELES — Q*bert is ready for his close-up.
After bringing Harry Potter and Mrs. Doubtfire to life on the big screen, Chris Columbus’ latest film sees the director inserting classic video game characters into the real world. “Pixels” follows a trio of 1980s arcade champions who are recruited by the government to stop an alien force that’s taking the form of Donkey Kong and other interactive critters.
“I was excited about bringing these characters to life in a way we haven’t seen,” said Columbus. “I’ve done visual effects before, but they’ve all been reality based. In this situation, we were creating 30-foot-tall voxelized, lived-from-within creatures that had to be menacing enough to destroy a city, yet also have a mischievous charm about them.”
“Pixels,” out Friday, is inspired by the 2010 short film of the same name that depicted old-school games wrecking blocky carnage on New York City. Columbus included imagery from about 20 titles, such as “Burger Time” and “Tetris.” The “Home Alone” director discusses bringing the games to life in his movie.
• “CENTIPEDE”: For their first mission against the misunderstood extraterrestrials, the “Pixels” protagonists played by Adam Sandler and Josh Gad encounter the slithering baddies who star in the 1981 shoot-’em-up “Centipede.” In the movie, behemoth renditions of the game’s bugs descend from the sky onto human forces on a soccer field in London.
“I wanted ‘Centipede’ to be a surrealistic three-dimensional moment,” said Columbus. “It’s the first time we really insert these characters..”
• “PAC-MAN”: An oversized tyrannical take on Pac-Man goes on a chomping spree through the streets of New York as the movie’s heroes tail the pellet-eating character in Mini Coopers. Columbus filmed the chase sequence over 3½ weeks by having the actors followed by a yellow golf cart, which was later replaced with a computer-generated Pac-Man.
“The key was that we weren’t immersing people into ‘Pac-Man’ as much as the game was forcing itself onto the streets of Manhattan,” said Columbus.
• “Q*BERT”: In the movie, the cube-hopping creature Qbert serves as an intergalactic trophy who eventually becomes a sidekick to the human heroes. Despite his history of speaking only in cartoon bubbles filled with punctuation marks, “The screenwriter opted to give the aliens’ version of Qbert a voice and beef up his role in “Pixels.”
• “DOJO QUEST”: The filmmakers licensed characters from real-world video games for the movie, but they opted to craft a fictional title starring a ninja-fighting heroine named Lady Lisa (played by Ashley Benson), who serves as an unconventional love interest for Gad’s character. To promote “Pixels,” Sony released a side-scrolling mobile game resembling “Dojo Quest.”
• “DONKEY KONG”: The movie’s climatic final battle takes place inside the alien’s mothership, where filmmakers recreated the original 1981 barrel-jumping game. Columbus called Donkey Kong “the holy grail” of game characters and said talking Nintendo into allowing them to feature the angry ape required more convincing than any of the other games depicted in “Pixels.”
