Josef Fares, an outspoken game designer, emerged in the industry 25 years ago as a Hollywood outsider. But the love of gaming has always been there. He remembers having one of the first Ataris in Lebanon. Pong was his passion and his first time experiencing a video game. Then life hit. At age 10, Fares fled the Lebanese Civil War and immigrated to Sweden with his family. Still the video games followed him, and he managed to get a Nintendo Entertainment System that he’d stay up all night playing Super Mario Bros. on.
He has always been a storyteller. It’s what came natural and helped him to make sense of his world from an early age. “Obviously there were challenges in school, being an immigrant and I was quite alone, and being an outsider, was part of the reason, maybe I went deeper into that creating stuff and being creative,” Fares tells Inverse.
