From Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever” to Lil’ Flip’s “Game Over,” gaming culture has inspired its share of hit songs. So why are there so few music videos that crib their style from classic arcade and console titles? Keith Schofield doesn’t know, but he’s perfectly happy to be thought of as the first director to indulge his digital-gaming obsessions in his work. “I’m fascinated by how our whole generation has a sentimental attachment to these electronic toys,” says the 27-year old filmmaker.

An NYU film school alum, Schofield first caught the music industry’s attention with a 2005 clip for DJ Format’s “3 Feet Deep,” centered on Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, in which MCs Abdominal and D-Sisive earn points with microphones in place of the game’s familiar, goofy exercise pads.

It was Schofield’s video for “When I Wake Up,” by the Los Angeles indie-rock quartet Wintergreen, that earned him a permanent place on hard-core gamers’ high-score tables: Mixing some well-chosen stock footage with scenes of the band playing a vintage Atari 2600, the short retells the notorious tale of the video game version of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In 1982, Atari rushed millions of copies of the genuinely awful game into stores, only to see it fail on an epic level. Urban myth has it that Atari buried its unsold E.T. inventory in the New Mexico desert, so the video accordingly ends with Wintergreen digging up those lost cartridges. “We were worried at first that the audience wouldn’t get it,” says Schofield. “But then we thought ‘Hey, if they don’t, they don’t.”

But plenty of joystick pushers spoke Schofield’s language: When the director posted the video on keithschofield.com, the clip received more than 100,000 hits. Though Schofield’s next video, for Death Cab For Cutie’s “Jealousy Rides With Me,” won’t feature any game-related imagery, he’s still looking for musicians he can surround with pixilated visuals. “I’d love to work with The Beastie Boys,” says Schofield. “And Rilo Kiley – wasn’t Jenny Lewis in The Wizard?”

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 3:30 am and is filed under Journalism, SPIN, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.