When Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who spent endless hours playing World of Warcraft, died at 25 from a degenerative muscular disease, his parents had no idea just how vibrant his life was despite having a condition that had robbed him of almost all movement.
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 on it about his death, the response they received was beyond their imagination. Their son was not alone. He’d had a whole community at his fingertips.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary directed by Norwegian director Benjamin Ree premiering Oct. 25 on Netflix, explores the hidden life of the gamer known as Ibelin and the people he reached online around the world.
Ree read about Mats in a 2019 BBC article by Vicky Shaubert. He discovered that not only did he have a connection to Robert and Trude, but he also had an idea about how to tell this story visually. First, he needed the family’s blessing.
Meeting for lunch, Ree said Mats’s parents told him they “needed to think about it, because for them, they were still grieving and they didn’t know if they would emotionally be capable of doing a film like that. Especially for Mats’s mother, Trude — it was almost like opening a wound.”
Their son, who had once run around as a small child, had gradually lost his ability to walk, go to school and engage in a world beyond their doorstep.
But when Robert and Trude hit “publish” on the news of Mats’s death on his blog Musings 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, for him, was real.
“There, my handicap doesn’t matter, my chains are broken and I can be whoever I want to be,” Mats wrote in a blog post. “In there I feel normal.”
Ree felt connected to Mats. Not only were they born seven days apart, but their parents had coincidentally run 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 entries. Ree asked Robert and Trude if they had documented Mats’s early life in home movies, as his parents had done for him.
The pair opened up their garage to Ree, who found 50 VHS cassettes with 75 hours of video covering Mats’s 25 years, giving the director the visuals — and the go-ahead — he needed from Mats’s parents.
“It almost feels like I’ve done a doctorate degree on Mats, studying him for four years,” Ree said about the gamer who had been diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “It’s been very inspiring to study him, and I really hope I’ve done it with respect, in a respectful way, with nuances and complexity.”
Once Ree connected with Mats’s World of Warcraft community, who knew him as the persona Ibelin — a private investigator whose name was inspired by Orlando Bloom’s character in the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven — what Ree found was especially complex.
“From the very beginning, our goal was to tell a coming-of-age story,” Ree said. Mats “had a lot of similar experiences like I had growing up,” the main difference being that Mats grew up inside the game.
“Everybody who grows up [makes] mistakes,” the director said.
In addition to the hours of home videos, the director and his team decided to re-create 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 talked to the other players who interacted with Mats through the game and their group, Starlight.
What came next in the filmmaking process was a huge gamble.
“What we did was … it’s possible to take out models directly from the game from the internet,” Ree explained about the World of Warcraft 3D animation scenes, created by independent gamers, that are woven into the film. “We actually made the film without asking for permission. We call it the Norwegian way.”
Eventually, the filmmakers had to contact Blizzard Entertainment, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company that created World of Warcraft.
“After like three years working on this film, we sent an email to the bosses of Blizzard and said, ‘Hello, we’re a Norwegian little production company. And we have made this film where we kind of used your whole IP.’ And then we asked if they wanted to watch it,” Ree explained.
Ree and producer Ingvil Giske headed to California to unspool the film for Blizzard executives. Not only were they asking for access to Blizzard’s intellectual property — they also wanted it for free.
“I was extremely nervous,” Ree said. “When we entered the big studio there, I had to take extra doses of asthma medicine in order to breathe.”
After the film ended, he said, “One of the bosses turned around to us and he was crying, and he told us that it’s a fantastic film and we will grant you the rights to use this.”
That was a relief to Ree and Giske, who otherwise had no Plan B.
What the Blizzard team saw was not a hagiography of Mats but instead a chronicle of a young man who lived a rich — and sometimes flawed — inner life.
Mats, Ree said, “was an amazing person, helped his friends, [was] a great listener, so kind, a lot of humor, but also he, he was very self-destructive at times, he lied at times, he lashed out to his friends. So I really wanted to show those sides as well. And as most humans, he also asked for forgiveness.”
So how does Ree think Mats would like to be portrayed?
“From Mats’s friends and family, they all said that Mats would never want to be only portrayed as a hero or a saint, but also to show the full person,” the director said. “And I really hope that we have managed to do that.”
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin starts streaming on Netflix on Oct. 25.
Leave a Comment