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A scene from the upcoming Web series, "Glitch." (Courtesy of Tyler Hill)
“Glitch” is an online sitcom about a game tester whose life becomes a bit too much like video games—glitches and all. The series has great humor that old school gamers should get a kick out of, good quality filming, and enough originality to stand out from the hordes of YouTube.
The series follows a video game tester, Glitch, who wishes his life was more like a video game. He gets his wish, but the old 8-bit glitches come along with the package.
“The initial thought was, how could we be ambitious and yet simple at the same time?” said Tyler Hill, one of the series’ creators, via e-mail. “8-bit and old school video game glitches was an interesting idea because it meant that we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune on special effects.”
Hill and co-producer Brian Sutherland would joke that the 8-bit glitch approach would work well, since “the worse the graphics looked, the funnier it would probably be!” he said.
But after the concept of the series was set, he and Sutherland realized they had something special on their hands—a show which he describes as “zany enough to let us go anywhere we wanted with it.”
The series pulls inspiration from just about everything geeky. Hill says he watches just about every sci-fi/fantasy TV show and movie out there, and plays just about every game he can. “Even the bad stuff,” he says—all in a hunger to “know all of it, good and not-so-good, because it’s all a part of this culture.”
Thus, the broad plate of geeky references “Glitch” pulls from has made it “a love letter to geek culture,” Hill said.
But it’s not corny, and it’s not one of the hip-geek shows made to make geeks look cool. Hill gave an example: “I’m not knocking the Big Bang Theory or anything, it’s funny and all, but it’s written by comedy writers, and the premise for the show is about geeks, the way ‘Cheers’ is about a bar or ‘The Office’ is about a cubicle environment. Because of that, I think the idea for the show is that the characters are sort of a window for non-geeks to look in on the geek world.”
What they’re going for is pure, unrefined geekiness—what he refers to as “a show for super geeks, made by super geeks.”
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