Rebel With A Co-Op

Josef Fares, an outspoken game designer, emerged in the industry 25 years ago as a Hollywood outsider. But the love of gaming has always been there. He remembers having one of the first Ataris in Lebanon. Pong was his passion and his first time experiencing a video game. Then life hit. At age 10, Fares fled the Lebanese Civil War and immigrated to Sweden with his family. Still the video games followed him, and he managed to get a Nintendo Entertainment System that he’d stay up all night playing Super Mario Bros. on.

He has always been a storyteller. It’s what came natural and helped him to make sense of his world from an early age. “Obviously there were challenges in school, being an immigrant and I was quite alone, and being an outsider, was part of the reason, maybe I went deeper into that creating stuff and being creative,” Fares tells Inverse.

By age 15, he took that storytelling and started to make movies. The medium made sense to him — even if it didn’t quite match the passion he had for that elementary-aged Pong playing.

His first real debut, at the age of 22, was Jalla! Jalla!. He followed that with Kopps, Zozo, Leo, and 2010’s Balls, introducing the world to comedic and heartfelt stories often performed by his real-life dad and brother, now movie star Fares Fares.

By 35, Fares had a burgeoning film career under his belt, plenty of buzz and interest — and then he took a left turn. Or, for the gamers out there, the right turn.

Fares' first video game was Brother: A Tale of Two Sons, in 2013. It garnered some critical acclaim, but mostly gave the gaming bug to Fares. Five years, a short movie, and a TV series later, Fares launched the beloved co-op A Way Out. Three years later, he hit pay dirt — winning nothing but praise for indie darling and eventual Game Award winner, It Takes Two, about a couple trying to jump through hoops to save a dying marriage. Today, Fares’ latest work, Split Fiction, though only just released, has inspired the kind of critical acclaim you usually only get once in a career.

Now 47, Fares is one of the rare game directors who speaks his mind and does his own thing, while pumping out hit after varied hit, in collaboration with big video game conglomerate, Electronic Arts. Despite the shareholder expectations that come with a job like his, Fares sticks to worrying about the passion, speaks his mind, and all but ignores the business models that help games get profitable.

As Fares puts it, “There are no creative limits. It’s so clear that when you truly, truly follow your passion, people will feel it and sense it.”

The King of the Couch Co-Op

Ever since Fares broke into the industry with Brothers, which came out with a remake last year, he’s made nothing but cooperative games that single players can’t attempt on their own. But why? He says he saw nobody else writing character-driven narrative for couch co-op games.

“There wasn’t anything really like this,” Fares explains. He homed in on the couch co-op because when you “play a co-op game with a friend … you have a character to relate to … it isn’t just about, like, ‘Shoot that, shoot this, do this, do that.’”

From Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, to A Way Out to It Takes Two, Fares has gone for relationship-driven stories that surprise players by how emotionally complex and well-told they are. A Way Out gave players a tale of two prisoners who have to work together to escape, and showcased multiple ways to overcome an obstacle. It Takes Two imagined the two playable characters as the toys of the girl whose parents were getting divorced, adding a layer of raw emotion to an already sad scenario.

Each of these games explores the relationship between two characters on-screen and in real life. “I still feel today, there's so much unexplored potential in video games, especially in how to tell stories,” Fares says.

“There are, like, passionate people, there are crazy people, and there is me.”

But Fares does seem to explore the stories through the limited — and, in gaming, the relatively rare — medium of the co-op. Split Fiction furthers his creative scope, with an odd couple ganging up against a large corporation bent on stealing their ideas. The two characters — Mio, an introverted, guarded, pessimist of a science-fiction writer and Zoe, an extroverted fantasy writer who sees the best in everyone — offer dueling views of the world as they face down a shared enemy in uber-capitalist and AI advocate James Rader.

The question isn’t, why does Fares keep making co-ops. How else could he tell these stories without game mechanics that cleverly explore opposing viewpoints, and experiments with what happens when you can walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?

An Equal Opportunity Rabble-Rouser

A significant amount of Fares’ rise to prominence comes from one night in 2017, on stage at the Game Awards. While promoting his upcoming game, A Way Out, he decided to curse out the Oscars. He blames the moment in part to jet lag but also an honest reaction to witnessing people constantly comparing Hollywood’s big award show to the Game Awards just before he got up on stage.

“Look, the Oscars should f*ck themselves up,” Fares said on live TV. “This is the sh*t! I’m telling you — this is, this is the real sh*t!”

“Look, the Oscars should f*ck themselves up,” Fares said during the live event. “This is the sh*t! I’m telling you — this is, this is the real sh*t!”

He also showed a degree of self-awareness by adding, “There are, like, passionate people, there are crazy people, and there is me.”

The moment would go down in history as people resonated with what Fares had said. Even awards host Geoff Keighley allowed that gaming deserved more respect than it got.

“When I said, ‘F*ck the Oscars,’ the audience, they also got very excited, and I got excitement from that,” Fares tells me over a video call from Sweden. “I didn’t think too much about it. I was chilling and relaxing in the party. But then, I woke up the day after, my computer was blowing up from emails, and all this sh*t, reactions, and whatnot. I didn’t really care, because I had to focus on delivering A Way Out.”

His outburst came from a very honest place — he was, after all, first a film insider who saw first-hand a dismissive view of video games.

And it might be fair to call this outburst par for the course. Fares is a truth-teller, who has also been very vocal in criticizing the video games industry he’s joined, wanting them to do better so they can be taken seriously as a form of art. He looks down on microtransactions for instance, and says no generative AI has been used in his latest game, Split Fiction. Don’t get him started on mobile games with a gambling component.

“I truly love video games and all of this stuff are not part of pushing the medium forward,” he says.

In this sense, Split Fiction is the uncommon title that represents everything Fares wants out of a game. It is art that transcends the medium. (Our critic scored the game a rare 10 out of 10.) It costs one price upfront with no micro-transactions and Fares has no plans to make it a live service game. Like the other greats that came before it, it’s imbued with a tender appreciation of gaming. He even named the characters, Mio and Zoe, after his 3- and 4-year-old daughters, who he wants to raise as gamers.

“I’m really trying, but they’re still a bit too young,” Fares says.

Since Fares’ famous Oscars speech in 2017, games have made significant headway in Hollywood with The Last of Us on HBO and Arcane on Netflix. Fares is paying no mind to such progress. He characterizes his talks with Hollywood as time-consuming and uneventful, although he acknowledges he’s still in talks.

“There’s so much bullsh*t, let’s be honest. There’s a lot of talk, blah, blah, blah,” Fares says. “I’m the kind of guy, like I don’t just want to talk to talk. I want to walk the walk.”

“There’s so much bullsh*t, let’s be honest. There’s a lot of talk, blah, blah, blah,” Fares says. “I’m the kind of guy, like I don’t just want to talk to talk. I want to walk the walk.”

That’s how Fares has made it as far as he has, given all the industry storms.

“Sometimes you still gotta trust your own instincts,” Fares says, “Trying not to see where the market is going but instead, saying to yourself, ‘What do I want to do?’ I just hope that would be more common in the industry.”