Saved by the Bell Goes 8-Bit: Q&A with the Fine Bros.

​If you've ever played an 8-bit video game, or even know what that means, then you've probably also spent way too many hours watching Saved by the Bell, that totally improbable but somehow massively popular early '90s TV show about high school students in southern California.

But what about combining the two?

Last week, the online comedy gurus known as the Fine Bros. (a.k.a. Benny and Rafi Fine) unleashed their retro-Nintendo YouTube hit "Saved by the Bell Interactive Game."

The game takes YouTube beyond the passive watching experience -- viewers get to shape how the story unfolds by making choices along the way. And the retro graphics and sound are spot on, with an original Nintendo vibe that'll make your thumbs twitch for the good ol' days. (You can also check out our sister blog's interview with the animator and music composer.)

How did you come up with the idea of making 8-bit videos?

Benny: The idea for all of this came when our animator on the Saved by the Bell project, Doctor Octoroc, made a video that went fairly viral -- 8-Bit Doctor Horrible. That wasn't a game. It was just this longform creation of the entire story of Dr. Horrible done in 8-bit form. When a friend showed us that, we realized, "Oh man, there's such a larger thing to be done here with this idea."

We caught up with the Fine Bros. to chat about the game, its retro vibe, and the future of online entertainment.

We ended up reaching out to him to start collaborating with him as our animator, and we came up with these projects to use his abilities as this amazing 8-bit animator to make a full, actual game inside of YouTube, which had really not been before.
Rafi: He also does the music. He's just a mad genius.

Why Saved by the Bell? How do you decide which projects to pursue?
Rafi: We've been online for seven years making content, and we always try to understand the zeitgeist. When you make content online, there are two things you can basically do. You can do things you're very passionate about, specific projects, but those are very hard to get viewership on. What we found is that you need to find a balance between having your passion projects and the ones that are going to get those mass viewership numbers and tap into the universal zeitgeist of content that people will want to watch, which will result in people also wanting to watch everything you do. And that's been part of our success model, creating both types of content.

So, with Saved by the Bell, it was understanding that the Internet is filled with our generation of people who love retro humor. Something like our Twilight game came from the fact that the movie was coming out -- knowing that there would be blogs and websites needing content to feature.

Do you have a favorite 8-bit game that you've made?

Benny: Definitely the Saved by the Bell game because it actually ended up being one of these perfect marriage situations where we love Saved by the Bell and it happens to be something very much in the cultural world of retro humor. That's something we grew up on and we're very passionate about. Honestly, we'd been kicking around doing other types of shows and then came to Saved by the Bell realizing, "Oh man, we know that show in an obsessive way."

Rafi: If we had the opportunity to kill Jess in animated form, I'd do that every week. I hate her so much [laughs].

The Fine Bros.

​

The video is actually an interactive game made up of several videos. Where did that concept come from?

Benny: The interactive stuff, that's all the YouTube annotation tool. YouTube created it years ago. I think the primary purpose was to be able to put text up on the screen or be able to point someone to another one of your videos. We were not the first people to do it, but I don't remember specifically if I was influenced by something or not.

We wanted to take it to a bigger place. Interactives were being done in cool ways by other people, but no one really had taken the idea of actually calling it a game and trying to create a game experience. There were some choose-your-own-adventure-style things that were very much like the choose-your-own-adventure books. The idea of taking control and turning it into a game is where we started from, and then we got very, very excited about the idea.

Again, we've been making content for seven years, and back seven years ago there was no YouTube and there was no social media. We kind of looked at the Web back then as "We're still trying to get to television," but the Web was like, "Wow, hands-on interaction, what's gonna make this different from the passive experience of television?"
Rafi: That's where things like the "'American Idol' Interactive Experience" came out of -- how do you build the idea of custom content and even custom comedy, where the viewers feel like they're part of the storytelling process? With the American Idol thing, where it was 57 videos deep, we created an experience in which there were 20 different outcomes for the video, so each user gets to have his own feeling of, "Wow, I click all these things and then I get my own experience that I chose." That's why it's called new media -- we should be having new experiences in the storytelling process.

Is interactive video the next big step for online entertainment?

Benny: I think it's a long way from that. I think even the idea of this exact type of experience is not something that I think everybody is ready for, especially the older demographics that are still so much in control of content right now. There's a lot more that traditional media could be doing to leverage what is already there.
Rafi: I don't like to go into financial stuff, but these things are so complex and difficult to make. Once you start making different offshoots of possible ways the story could go, you're adding minutes and money. You can get so caught up in this that first it's just making one video, then having to make four, so now you've made a short film instead of just a quick video. It can turn into a feature film if you're not careful.

Literally, I don't think that anybody is ready for that idea of making that much content. There's no money on the Internet yet to be able to create experiences like this on a mass level because of the time and dedication that it would need. It's pretty ridiculous. But I think things like this kind of help get us on that path of being like, "These are the tools, and people actually love engaging with it," so maybe investment will come with that.

Are 8-bit and 16-bit retro videos a new trend?

Rafi: I think it's a trend. It's an automatic thing that people just love.

Follow us on Twitter at @ExhibitionistSF and like us on Facebook.