In the action comedy Pixels, which will be released at the end of the month, Adam Sandler plays Sam Brenner who was the PacMan champion in the Eighties. Thanks to a communication gap, aliens are attacking the world in the form of video games. Brenner who just happens to be the President’s best friend, heads a team of gamers including Peter Dinklage, to save the world from PacMan, Donkey Kong and the like. At a press conference in Cancun, Mexico, Sandler talks about gaming, fatherhood and more. Excerpts.
As far as gaming goes, are you old-fashioned, or up to date?
I am always right back to the Eighties games. It is the only ones I’m comfortable with. I’m not great at anything new. Josh (Gad) is more the newer breed. He knows what is happening. I play Minion Rush with my kids. The ones on the iPhone where you just have to tilt it left and right, I can handle that. That is about it.
What kind of games did you play in the Eighties, and what was your favourite?
I played them all but my best game was Galaxian. That was the one I put the most quarters into, the one I would sneak away from my parents. Like if we were at Pizza Hut and there was a Galaxian sit-down table, I would just whine until I was given a quarter and I would run over there and play.
Did you have to explain these games to your kids?
Everybody knows who Pac-Man is. Every kid knows Donkey Kong. It is crazy. It is like it just came out now. At the end of a movie we do these things like Focus Group, and they fill out pieces of paper on if they liked the movie, and what about awareness, and every time we screened it, the awareness on Pac-Man was a hundred percent, every age. Every kid, every grandma knew him.
Visually the games of the Eighties, they were fun to look at. Asteroids was cool looking, even if it was just a circle and a little triangle chasing around. This stuff looked very cool and very friendly. The colours were very friendly, and I think that was part of the reason you just liked being in that world. It felt welcoming. You are shooting things, you are trying to damage things, but yeah… I don’t know. The most exciting thing about the movie is the visual of it all, and it just feels welcoming.
Why do we need video games?
I don’t know. Why do we need TV? Why do we need anything? It just happens and people have a good time with them. If someone is playing a shooter and they’re losing their marbles from it, you definitely should pull it away from them. But most of the time it is just a fun way to pass the time, and I guess the best thing about our era was that at least you had to put quarters in the machine and you could run out of quarters. Now it is just like you lose and you go … ‘Let me go again.’
