Watch The Original Pixels Short Film Which Spawned The 2015 Movie

Now that everyone is excited about the Pixels movie following the debut of the first Pixels teaser trailer, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Pixels short film which started it all. The following two-minute Pixels short film was released in April 2010 and went viral. Sony acquired the rights to turn the short film into a movie, and we will finally be seeing that movie soon. After the jump you can read Russ Fischer's original April 8th 2010 report on the Pixels short film, followed by an embed of the short.

The original April 8th 2010 post from Russ Fischer follows:

Mix the 'aliens attack!' idea of Panic Attack with a love for the first wave of arcade video games, and you get PIXELS: Retro Gamers. This great two-minute film sees New York City beseiged by waves of early arcade characters, from Pac-Man to Space Invaders. A wave of pixelated destruction follows these characters through the city, and you'll probably love watching it happen.

Patrick Jean directs, and the production house is OneMoreProduction. Don't look to this video for anything particularly groundbreaking; instead check it out for the love for classic gaming and an appropriate twist on city destruction epics. Why can't Roland Emmerich make this movie? Combine this stuff and the Twitter feed of John Cusack and you've got an Emmerich remix I would watch a hundred times. (In other words, I'm obliquely asking Patrick Jean to make a movie version of a Cusack-centric installation of Tweet Defense. No, I'm actually demanding that.)

There are so many tasty touches here. The behavior and movement of objects as they shatter into pixels. The way the game characters have been incorporated into the invasion — Tetris blocks fitting into buildings and Pac Man eating through the subway? Hardly genius, but certainly perceptive and fun.

There are two versions of this floating around. One just has native sound effects, while the other is effectively a music video featuring a track by Naive New Beaters. The band is listed in the credits for the version featuring the song, so it doesn't seem like someone added that track afterwards. The effects is very different with and without the music. With the song, it's a crazy, bouncy music vid. Without, it's a much more ominous piece of work. I like the track, but think I like the effect better without.