Games
The hottest games media personality around, Danny O’Dwyer is making lengthy documentaries and bucking the trend of how games are covered on YouTube.
Having spent a career talking on camera to an audience about what makes us tick and why we fall for the games we love to so much, it was perhaps inevitable that Danny O’Dwyer would end up creating something like Noclip. These are documentaries that focus on the stories behind games, offering insightful commentary from the people who were there, and made them the games they became. O’Dwyer may have started out in a small town in Ireland, but nowadays he’s the producer of one of the hottest YouTube channels out there, pioneering a new medium for games coverage that didn’t really exist before: the web documentary.
“We think of media as this sort of intermediary between the things we love and us, but media itself is an incredibly powerful tool,” O’Dwyer tells us. “There’s so much of it now we kind of take it for granted. It has the power to shape people’s lives and it certainly shaped mine.”
Nobody else is out there attempting to understand and document how a Final Fantasy failed, or uncover footage of a cancelled AAA game that has never been seen elsewhere. Few get the opportunity to speak to people like Doom creator John Romero, in his own home. But O’Dwyer is a trusted voice, and Noclip is only getting bigger.
Noclip produces documentaries about games that speak to people. These are advert-free, honest conversations that have taken O’Dwyer all over the world, even in the company’s first year. These phenomenal documentaries explode every time a new one is released, and despite the fact he makes the videos primarily for his 4,000 plus Patreon supporters, part one of his Doom documentary (at the time of writing) sits on nearly 900,000 views, while his multiple films on The Witcher (his most recent series) are all hitting the 100,000-200,000 mark within a month. He’s spoken to game development royalty such as the man behind Spelunky, Derek Yu, about the craft and design of everything from the mysteries hidden deep within a game, to how enormous franchises can be rebuilt.
“I think I understand the ways in which people care about games”, O’Dwyer says. “We talk to people about the things that they find boring, but the people who play games find fascinating. We crack open the vault of knowledge that developers have about the decisions they make that end up in the games we love to play. It’s a way of looking into areas of games, dark areas, unseen areas that people have never really poked into before.” Given the numbers he’s seeing, it certainly suggests there’s an audience hungry for in-depth conversations with the developers behind the games we all love.
O’Dwyer has chatted to the likes of Mick Gordon, the composer behind the sensational industrial metal from the 2016 Doom reboot. He’s spoken to the Psyonix, the developers behind Rocket League about how the team had to learn a lot of hard lessons from the previously released Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, which nobody played.
Something borrowed, something new
Despite all of this, O’Dwyer doesn’t feel the niche Noclip has carved out is particularly clever. “Any DVD you bought had behind the scenes showing directors and actors sitting down and talking – it’s just that nobody in games was doing it in a way that wasn’t super boring”, he says.
“It was never about this weird thing that was happening in a game. How did you design that tree? How did you create that level? Why did you pick that music? Stuff that people actually care about; people were never asking that, because it was always in the heat of an expo or a show.”
O’Dwyer doesn’t quite give himself credit in this regard: few have the access that Noclip enjoy. To many in his position, there are closed doors you don’t even ask to open. Often there is a divide in the way the media are handled. North American and European companies are fairly open to most conversations, but Japan is notoriously hard, and not just because of the language barrier. The fact that Noclip published a spectacularly deep Final Fantasy XIV documentary that is fundamentally about a failure which led to success, is remarkable – not least because he managed to get publishers Square Enix onboard for the project.
How did he pull it off? “I think there’s a couple of things happening,” O’Dwyer muses. “What we do at Noclip, we have a very firm focus: we tell authentic stories about how games got made. We don’t have a wing that does news, so we’re not turning these interviews into headlines. So when you remove that element, people open up a bit more because they’re not worried about the headline of the one thing that they said and perhaps shouldn’t have”.
It’s also worth noting that most of the documentaries so far have some distance from the time that the titles originally came out. “We’re talking to them a year, or four years after a game came out, and there’s not much they can say that will not make the game sell any more, or take the wind out of the marketing team’s sails,” he says.
“That’s when people are willing to get into authentic conversations, because people are willing to tell you about their failures. The Final Fantasy team are willing to talk about their failure because ultimately the game is now a massive financial success. With [the never before seen] Doom 4, Bethesda can talk about it now. Try and talk about that game six months before the reboot came out, and it’s not happening.”
I felt like I just found the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was the only person outside of this company to see this game made eight years ago.
So just how does it work, then? Surely these massive conglomerate corporations must have rules, and final say over the produced output? “With every company the conversation resets, and it depends on the company or the game,” O’Dwyer explains, “but the main proviso I have is that they have no control over the output, or what happens on the edit floor. Some people are more nervous than others. With the Final Fantasy doc, we had American PR teams talking to the Japanese teams. We interviewed the CEO of a publicly traded company in Japan, which does not happen, so there are lots of people who are stakeholders and a little bit nervous, so we gave them early cuts to ensure they were happy with the translations.”
The Doom documentary series is another achievement. Not only did it showcase id Software’s creative director Hugo Martin as a man who cared deeply about the game he was making, it showed footage of Doom 4, a game that nobody outside of Bethesda had ever seen, anywhere. “I got the footage at 11:30 at night and I felt like I just found the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was sat in front of my PC, clicking play and sitting back thinking how I was the only person outside of this company to see this thing that was made eight years ago, that probably nobody will ever see. That was amazing.”
Given the complete independence, how on earth do you choose a subject, though? Why was Rocket League the first documentary? What’s next? Who else is on the bucket list? He explains: “One of biggest aspects is that initially, when I started Noclip I tackled games that I already knew had interesting stories behind them. If nothing else then to restrict the amount of pre-production that’d be involved.”
On that note, O’Dwyer is a big fan of Rocket League, Doom, Frog Fractions, The Witness, and Spelunky, but he had never played a Final Fantasy game. “I had never touched Final Fantasy XIV online, I’m not a JRPG fan, so that was a test for me to be able to take on a story that I knew was there”, he explains. “So I played it online in secret for about a month, because it’s hard to play for 80 hours without somebody noticing. Ultimately I want to challenge myself as an editor and writer, so tackling games I’ve never played before, especially an MMO that’s been running for five years, is a good way of doing that.”
Does he have any favourite, then, after his first year of doing Noclip? “It changes all the time”, he says. “We did this weird one in February called Rediscovering Mystery, which is about the idea of urban legends in video games. We interviewed three different developers, and included clips from our [Patreon] patrons, and I think that might be my favourite. It’s a video about the things you would talk about on the schoolyard with your mates”.
Outside of gaming, the format may not be new, but O’Dwyer has won a loyal audience with his ability to get interviewees onside. “It’s the nature of the way we interview people”, he explains, “my interview style is painfully laid back. It’s me, one shooter, we don’t put up a lighting rig, and we shoot it in a place that is comfortable to them. The one thing I’m proud of is that we tend to get people to open up. If you watch interviews with Hugo Martin elsewhere, he doesn’t talk like that, but we ask him about the stuff he actually cares about, and when you do that, and research, you can have a conversation, and people blossom.”
Jonathan Blow, creator of acclaimed indie puzzler Braid and The Witness, notoriously obtuse, is another one who opened up on camera for O’Dwyer. “We spoke to him for three hours”, says O’Dwyer. “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever met, so it’s actually quite gruelling having a long conversation with someone that smart. I was shattered by the end, but it’s so lovely meeting these people because you don’t know what they’re like. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, though, he’s down to earth, but he’s definitely very intellectual.”
The Grand Theft Auto documentary: Coming soon?
Noclip is in an interesting space. Being entirely funded by Patreon, a crowdfunding site, it means that every view over the number of backers is a bonus. “Everything’s a bonus, totally. Noclip is basically just two people”, O’Dwyer says, referring to Jeremy Jayne, his director of photography. “That’s why the patrons’ names are in the videos, because they made it as much as I made it. I couldn’t make it if it wasn’t for the funding we have.”
So what’s the future for Noclip, and year two, then? Does O’Dwyer have any people to interview on his bucket list? The Grand Theft Auto creators are high on his priority list, he reveals.
“The one I want to do more than anything else is Rockstar”, he says. “I want to talk to them about how they make those massive worlds, or how those sunsets look so good. I feel like there’s so much to learn in terms of game development and I’d love to crack that nut one day.”. And given the quality of the documentaries from Noclip so far, we can only hope.
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