Within a modern but nondescript building a few hundred feet from Stockholm’s pretty Riddarfjarden Bay, a frosted glass wall in Josef Fares’s office displays etched characters from It Takes Two, his video game studio’s “Toy Story”-esque cooperative adventure about an adult couple’s broken relationship. Near his desk, in a lighted case, sits a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.
“I can relate, you know, to someone who’s speaking his mind,” Fares said.
In an industry where executives have become mired in tech marketing-speak and can be as protected by publicists as Hollywood stars are, Fares stands out. Many gamers know the garrulous designer for his appearance at the glitzy Game Awards in 2017, when he twice dismissed the Oscars with a swear word before raising his middle finger to the camera.
The sentiment could come as a shock from a person who began his artistic career as a moviemaker, including an autobiographical coming-of-age film set during the Lebanese civil war that was Sweden’s entry for best international feature at the Oscars in 2006. But for the past dozen years, Fares’s passion has been video games, especially cooperative experiences that can be played on the couch with a sibling, partner, child or friend.
Fares enjoyed games from the moment he played Pong on an Atari 2600 while living in Beirut; he fell in love in 1988 when he experienced Super Mario Bros. in Stockholm.
After working with a few students to make a game demo in 2009, Fares got excited. That very night he came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, about siblings working together in a time of crisis. His interest in movies dwindled.
“It’s like falling in love with something I can’t quit,” Fares, 47, said. “There’s not a single day in my life that I don’t think about video games.”
During an era of faceless online gaming, Fares has shown time and time again that there is still a market for the communal experience. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2013) became an essential part of the indie game revolution. Hazelight, the studio he began afterward, found immediate success with A Way Out (2018), a cooperative prison-escape experience, and then sold nearly 23 million copies of It Takes Two (2021).
Hazelight’s newest game, Split Fiction, is a rocket-fast roller coaster ride of science fiction, fantasy and collegiality that has received critical praise. During the game’s eight chapters, which can be played online, two daring scribes travel to fantastical, sometimes surreal environments. Fares said there was usually one key word from which a game blossoms. For Brothers, it was “sorrow.” For Split Fiction, it was “friendship.”
Neil Druckmann, the studio director of Naughty Dog whose credits include Uncharted and The Last of Us, called Fares a “high-energy dude” and a “confident artist” who wanted to try things no one had done. He likened Fares’s work to making music.
“There’s a little bit of, like, a hip-hop to it, you know, where you’re kind of sampling these ideas,” Druckmann said. “But he’s making them his own.”
There are regular nods to pop culture and gaming history in Split Fiction, including “Dune,” Crash Bandicoot and Mario Kart. There is both “The Lord of the Rings” and The Legend of Zelda. The list goes on.
In one sequence, Fares borrows a little from the movies “Shrek” and “Babe.” As you control a pig that flies by passing gas, colorful confetti, white stars and a rainbow emerge from the porcine behind.
Fares’s personality is regularly described as “eccentric” or “crazy,” and he even pokes fun at his persona. The video of his Oscars outburst — in which he highlighted how video games are an interactive experience — is an Easter egg in It Takes Two.
But on a recent video call, Fares, dressed in a beige, cable-stitched sweater, was reflective. Sitting on a beige couch in Hazelight’s office with his feet up on the cushions, he explained how his parents had tried to emigrate to Sweden from Beirut five times before their application was approved.
They were eager to get their six children to a peaceful environment far away from the constant bombings of Lebanon’s civil war, which took 150,000 lives and created a million refugees between 1975 and 1990.
“The first 10 years of my life was very violent and very harsh,” said Fares, who added that the formative experience built his self-assurance.
In 2005, Fares documented his childhood in the midst of war through “Zozo,” a movie that depicted bombs exploding, apartments blowing up and lives eliminated. Oddly but effectively, a shellshocked child befriends a chick he finds on his rooftop.
Fares himself had a chicken as a pet, a friend he could talk to amid the real-life devastation he witnessed. When he left it with older chickens, the chick was attacked and killed. “It was traumatic,” he said, a terribly disquieting moment.
Several of Fares’s other movies featured his brother, Fares Fares, an actor who went on to appear in the television series “Tyrant,” “Westworld” and “The Wheel of Time.” And as he did with “Zozo,” also Fares’s nickname, he has placed portions of his life in Hazelight’s games, sometimes bravely. At the end of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, there is an emotional burial.
“I actually buried my own little brother,” Fares said. “He died in his birth. So he was still a baby. And for some reason, me and my sister went to bury him.”
It is here that Fares talked quietly about the need for family and friends. All of Hazelight’s games are cooperative endeavors, played best with two people sitting near each other on the couch. The studio tries to balance its desire for challenging gameplay with its concern of causing too much strife, and the automatic save points in Split Fiction come frequently.
“We build up a super hard trust between two people,” Fares said. “And then you all of a sudden, you might trash it and you might have to go against each other. There’s something interesting about that to create this kind of tension between two people.”
Earlier in the day, before work, Fares had driven his two young daughters to school. He was now readying to pick them up. Mio and Zoe, the two characters in Split Fiction, are named after his children, he said, “so I can have them with me even when I’m working.” In the game, Mio is introverted and Zoe is extroverted; unlike his children, they do not immediately care for each other’s company.
Early on, after each voices a distaste for the other’s favored writing genre, the authors are forced to jump from one moving space vehicle to another, all while under attack. The scene is backed by a sci-fi soundtrack with high-tension synths by the musician Gustav Grefberg, who has scored all of Hazelight’s games as well as Wolfenstein: The New Order.
Grefberg believed in Fares’s vision as soon as he saw a prototype of Brothers. “I begged Josef to work with him,” Grefberg said.
Moved by Fares’s excitement and confidence, Grefberg wanted to join a team that had so many new ideas. An annual game jam at Hazelight known as “Freaky Week” generates free-flowing ideas from across the 83-person company.
Beyond Fares’s intensity — “When Josef says he wants more action, he says it as if it’s almost like an emotional word,” Grefberg said — he is deeply philosophical. The colleagues have had wide-ranging conversations about the meaning of meditation, Zen concepts and spirituality. That does not mean Fares has lost his ambition. He may even return to filmmaking, if he can find the time.
“I believe Split Fiction could potentially be a great movie,” he said.
The game already has audiences transfixed.
