'Wreck-It Ralph' celebrates video-game nostalgia

Associated Press Modified: November 1, 2012 at 10:47 am •  Published: November 1, 2012

Reilly, McBrayer and Silverman all grew up as gamers, and say bringing life to their animated characters called upon the same imagination and determination gaming did when they were kids.

"If you were born any time after 1965, when I was born, video games made a huge impression," Reilly said, adding that when "Space Invaders" first came out, "it was like a spaceship landed in the bowling alley."

"People can't fully appreciate what an insane change that was," he continued. "Because there were no computers; there were no cellphones. I didn't even have a VCR at that point. There was no way to manipulate something on a screen. And all of a sudden, this thing lands in the arcade."

McBrayer grew up with an Atari 2600 system, "but we kept that over at grandma's house so we wouldn't get too attached to it."

He remembers taking his report card to Super Scooper, the ice-cream parlor/arcade near his Georgia home, where good grades were rewarded with video-game tokens. He preferred the "cutesy, non-threatening games" and the escape they provided.

"So many kids won't even recognize half of these (game references in the film)," McBray said, "but I hope they have fun just realizing that there's this whole world of video-game characters and environments that make up the history of the video games they're playing now."

Silverman, whose early arcade favorites included "Asteroids," ''Missile Command" and "Space Invaders," notes that video games have been around for 30 years, "but in technology years, that's like 200 years old."

The actors said they don't play video games much these days, but the film's director does, whipping out his iPhone during a recent interview to prove the point.

"I feel really, really fortunate to have been someone who got to grow up with them," said Moore, whose previous directing credits include "The Simpsons" and "Futurama." So it's an honor and a privilege to be the guy that gets to pull from one end of the timeline to this end of the timeline ... to put them in a movie and put them in a story that pays tribute to all of them."






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