Then Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who spent endless hours playing World of Warcraftdied at the age of 25 from a degenerative muscle disease, his parents had no idea how vibrant his life was, despite having a condition that robbed him of almost all exercise.
The gamer, who died in 2014, had left behind the password to his blog, and when his parents Robert and Trude Steen decided to post a message about his death there, the reactions they received were beyond their imagination. Their son was not alone. He had an entire community at his fingertips.
The remarkable life of Ibelina documentary directed by Norwegian director Benjamin Ree premiering on Netflix on October 25, explores the hidden life of the gamer known as Ibelin and the people he has reached online around the world.
Ree read about Mats in a 2019 BBC article by Vicky Shaubert. He discovered that not only did he connect with Robert and Trude, but he also had an idea of how to tell this story visually. First, he needed the family’s blessing.
Over lunch, Ree said Mats’ parents told him to “think about it, because for them they were still grieving and didn’t know if they would be emotionally capable of making such a film.” Especially for Mats’ mother, Trude, it was almost like opening a wound.”
Their son, who once walked around as a small child, had gradually lost his ability to walk, go to school and participate in a world outside their door.
But when Robert and Trude clicked ‘publish’, the news of Mats’ death was published on his blog Reflections on life, what they discovered was that Mats was a main character in a World of Warcraft group of about 30 people around the world. In the game he could walk, run and even experience his first kiss, if only virtually. In the process, he fell in love, annoyed his friends, broke hearts, and even experienced heartbreak himself. That was real to him.
“My disability doesn’t matter there, my chains are broken and I can be who I want to be,” Mats wrote in a blog post. “I feel normal there.”
Ree felt connected to Mats. Not only were they born seven days apart, but their parents happened to be in the same circles. The director wanted to tell the young man’s story, but he needed more than a few photos of Mats and his blog posts. Ree asked Robert and Trude if they had documented Mats’ early life in home movies, as his parents had done for him.
The pair opened their garage to Ree, who found 50 VHS cassettes containing 75 hours of video spanning Mats’ 25 years, giving the director the footage — and the green light — he needed from Mats’ parents.
“It almost feels like I did my PhD on Mats and studied him for four years,” Ree said of the gamer who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “It was very inspiring to study him, and I really hope that I did it respectfully, in a respectful way, with nuance and complexity.”
Ree once made contact with Mats World of Warcraft community, who knew him as the persona Ibelin – a private detective whose name was inspired by Orlando Bloom’s character in the 2005 film Kingdom of heaven – what Ree discovered was extremely complex.
“From the very beginning, our goal was to tell a coming-of-age story,” says Ree. Mats “had a lot of similar experiences to me growing up,” with the main difference being that Mats grew up in the game.
“Everyone growing up [makes] mistakes,” said the director.
In addition to the hours of home videos, the director and his team decided to remake Mats’s World of Warcraft experiences as part of the documentary, using his blog posts and a voice-over actor who sounded like Mats as a guide. They also spoke with the other players who communicated with Mats through the game and with their group, Starlight.
What came next in the filmmaking process was a huge gamble.
“What we did was… it’s possible to pull models directly from the game from the internet,” Ree explains World of Warcraft 3D animated scenes, created by independent gamers, woven into the film. “We actually made the film without asking permission. We call it the Norwegian way.”
Ultimately, the filmmakers had to contact Blizzard Entertainment, the Santa Monica, California-based company that created the film World of Warcraft.
“After about three years of working on this movie, we sent an email to the bosses at Blizzard and said, ‘Hello, we are a small Norwegian production company. And we made this movie where we used your entire IP.” And then we asked if they wanted to watch it,” Ree explained.
Ree and producer Ingvil Giske went to California to roll out the film for Blizzard executives. Not only did they ask for access to Blizzard’s intellectual property, they wanted it for free.
“I was extremely nervous,” Ree said. “When we went into the big studio there, I had to take extra doses of asthma medicine to be able to breathe.”
After the movie ended, he said, “One of the bosses turned to us and he was crying, and he told us it’s a fantastic movie and we’re going to grant you the rights to use it.”
That was a relief for Ree and Giske, who had no Plan B.
What the Blizzard team saw was not a hagiography of Mats, but a chronicle of a young man who lived a rich – and sometimes flawed – inner life.
Mats, said Ree, ‘was a great person, helped his friends, [was] a great listener, so friendly, lots of humor, but also he, he was sometimes very self-destructive, he sometimes lied, he lashed out at his friends. So I really wanted to show those sides. And like most people, he also asked for forgiveness.”
So how does Ree think Mats would like to be portrayed?
“Mats’ friends and family all said that Mats would never want to be portrayed only as a hero or saint, but would also like to show the complete person,” said the director. “And I really hope we have succeeded.”
The remarkable life of Ibelin begins streaming on Netflix on October 25.
