Spaced's Simon Pegg plays games.
In the wonderful North London-set zombie comedy Shaun Of The Dead, gaming has a role much as it did in the film's progenitor, cult TV series Spaced. In Spaced, Simon Pegg's character, Tim, was a gamer, in one memorable episode slipping into a Resident Evil 2 fantasy after a night on the speed.
In Shaun, though, the gaming obsessive duties shift slightly away from Pegg's hero, Shaun, to his best friend Ed (Nick Frost), whose lifestyle consists of selling a little dope and gaming (they play TimeSplitters 2 in the film - nice choice). What's questionable for a gamer watching the film – which is essentially a satire of modern urban life – is that it seems to be including gaming in its checklist of parallels between us and the living dead (commuting, dead-end jobs, apathy in relationships, etc).
Co-writer Pegg, himself a gamer (he'd been playing Jedi Outcast prior to our interview), dispelled these concerns: “The videogame thing was never really about saying people who play videogames are zombies – even though you can become one if you get into a particularly good adventure game and end up sitting there for 12 hours. The games thing really was to set up this idea of practising fighting then having to really fight.”
Shaun Of The Dead
In this case, it created in a comic distinction between how adept the boys were with a PS2 but how inept they were with a Winchester rifle. “Shaun's very good at gaming, but when it comes to actually firing the gun he's crap at it. It takes him nine times to actually hit somebody in the head.”
Director and co-writer Edgar Wright says, “One of our first ideas was to have a firearm in it, but show it in a realistic light in terms of, ‘I've played so many first-person shoot-em-up games but if someone gave me an automatic I probably wouldn’t even be strong enough to pull the trigger back properly.’”
Wright's also been a gamer in his time. “I'm not as big a gamer as I used to be. But when I go round to Simon's I can quite happily sit and play Tony Hawks for hours on end.” He elaborates: “While I was making Spaced I also spent an enormous amount of time gaming. The actual PS console that was in Spaced was mine and I left it on the set at the end of the show. They're amazing things but I found it a bit like a Ouija board, in terms of ‘I have to get this out of the house.’”
Resident Evil and Time Splitters.
Despite a Shaun Of The Dead spin-off comic strip from 2000AD (out 07 April), there are no plans for a spin-off videogame. But it's an idea that enthuses both Pegg and Wright. “It'd be great to do a first-person game with, like, a cricket bat, rather than a gun. There's been so many zombie shoot-em-up games that it would be really good to have, like, a thwacking game,” Pegg says. “A Resident Evil-style adventure, but with a British romantic comedy twist of course.” Just don't imagine that playing it would equip you to deal with a real zombie apocalypse.
Shaun Of The Dead, on selected release 09 April 04.