In the mind of Dave Jaffe

It's rare to hear anyone describe their youth in suburban shopping malls as the wellspring of a creative intellectual life. But for Dave Jaffe, the rising-star designer behind the Twisted Metal ® franchise and the newly released God of War™ for the PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system it was exactly that. "I'm going to go to Brookwood Mall like I always do when I go home," Jaffe told the Birmingham Daily News, about an upcoming visit to his Alabama hometown, "and I swear, if there's a God of War �I'm about to cry right now talking about it�if there's a God of War in Brookwood mall, it's like ultra full-circle moment. You know what I'm saying? The fact that I get to go back to that mall, and now there's a game that I made that they're actually selling, I may just kinda pass out."

And why not? Brookwood Mall, after all, holds the movie theater where Jaffe first saw the two most influential movies of his creative life, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Clash of the Titans, it had the Book World where he read magazines about those movies, and he and his older brother used to hang out in the back room of the mall's Radio Shack, programming text-based adventure games in Basic, on the early PCs ("You're in a dark room and there's a troll," Jaffe says, "what do you do? It was that kind of that thing."). Most important of all, Brookwood was home to Aladdin's Castle, the video game arcade Jaffe remembers with near mystical fondness.

"I still dream about that place," he says. "There's some kind of symbolism I haven't figured out, because I'll have dreams that it's open and I'm inside, I'll have dreams that it's closed down and I'm standing in front of it and it's all boarded up, and I'll have dreams that I'm in there but I want to leave because I'm done with it, or dreams that I want to get in so bad. And it was a dark room filled with the best arcade games, and it was a great place to just get lost in the fantasy. I think the arcade, because they really don't exist in the way they used to, I think that's my generation's nostalgic touch-stone."

Jaffe eventually moved west, finding a job at Sony Computer Entertainment America, in Santa Monica. For the last ten years, all of them with Sony, he has devoted his life to recreating those early gaming experiences�first on Mickey Mania , then on the Twisted Metal series and Kinetica™ . "I love giving others the same amazing feelings I get when I am lost to a great game," he writes in his blog. "I loved the times me and my neighbor would grab a bag of Doritos and try to figure out Ultima III , or sitting in my first apartment, stuffing myself with McDonald's French fries, wrapped in a blanket and taking my first play through FLASHBACK."

God of War , which follows the ancient warrior Kratos on a dark odyssey through Greek mythology, represents Jaffe's greatest effort yet. "I really got to indulge all my fantasies," he says. "A lot of it is going back to being a kid, you play Adventure on the 2600, or you play Mask of the Sun, and you can envision a lot more than what's happening on the screen, because of the technology. So with God of War , I was able to make the game that I was playing in my head in the 70s and 80s." With genuine fervor, Jaffe says his favorite game designers are those who bring something of their soul to the work, and he sees the current video game business as "almost like the film business if all they had were grips and electricians and cameramen but they didn't have the actors, the directors, or the screen writers. We have an industry full of incredibly talented craftspeople, but the problem is there has been a real lack of people who come into the game who are interested in something to say."

Jaffe, of course, is an exception, and God of War , his proof. Even Kratos, the muscle-ripped hero , is best understood as a Jaffe alter-ego. "I don't want to hang out with that guy," Jaffe told the Birmingham Daily News, sweetly, "because he'd probably kill me, but sometimes I want to be that guy." And when pressed, Jaffe changes tack: "I think if I were to meet Kratos in real life we'd be buddies. Sometimes I see him in my head, and he's a real character to me. He's not just a video game blip on the screen. He really does represent a big part of me, not just in terms of the rage and the violence but also in terms of that spirit of a little kid. You get the sense that he's just plundering temples and fighting the Cyclops and having a great time doing it. There's something about him that I really love. It sounds creepy and stupid but I do feel like he's a very real character to me."

Kratos is a very real character to a lot of us by now, but soon enough, Jaffe will be too. With the whole-hearted enthusiasm of the childhood gamer, the story-telling skills of a film-buff, and more than enough creative hunger to make gaming into a genuine artistic medium, he proves that mall life is indeed more than it's cracked up to be.