The first announcement from Netflix’s annual “Geeked Week” celebrations, today the streamer dropped the first trailer for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary mixing archival footage with animation from inside Blizzard’s 20-year-old pop culture legend, World of Warcraft.
Directed by Benjamin Ree, Ibelin followes the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of a muscular degenerative disease at just 25. While his family thought Mats’ disease had left him isolated and alone up until his death, they discover that Mats’ social life flourished through years of playing his World of Warcraft character, Ibelin, touching the lives of a whole community of people across the world through the realms of Azeroth.
The documentary–which won the Audience Award at the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance earlier this year–mixes archival family footage of Mats growing up and living with his condition, as well as his time playing games, with interviews with Warcraft players who knew him only as Ibelin, and the impact he had on their lives through the MMORPG. But fascinatingly, the documentary will also feature narrated excerpts from Mats’ blog journaling his second life in Azeroth, alongside recreations of his adventures performed via machinima using World of Warcraft‘s game engine as it exists now. Warcraft underwent a graphical update in 2014 to mark its 10th anniversary with the release of Warlords of Draenor, overhauling the player character models with more detail and animated expressiveness, which Ibelin uses to great effect here. We’ve come a long way since South Park did “Make Love, Not Warcraft“.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is set to come to Netflix in the near future.
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