Longtime video game player Neil Patrick Harris stars in a new commercial for Nintendo‘s Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain, a collection of party and puzzle games.
There are “hundreds” of mini-games included, he shares on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter, which can be played solo or in groups of four. “You create an avatar of yourself and then you can choose your level of challenge, and then you can play against each other in different types of games, or you can spin the big wheel and it will randomly choose a game for you.”
When Harris filmed the commercial, he was given “a little private tutorial” of how the game worked “from a Nintendo specialist in a small room” because the game hadn’t been released yet. “It’s very much in line with the previous Big Brain Academy chapter [that released in 2005], but we loved it, and it was so fun to be able to play party games … my favorite scene to film was when we were all on the couch playing the games together. We didn’t have to do much acting.”
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The How I Met Your Mother star tells THR that he has been a Nintendo fan since age 10 or 11 and discovered video games simply through curiosity. “My father’s father had one of the first personal computers and when I would go and visit them I remember just learning how the basics of coding worked, learning to follow the technological ladder as it went from computer the size of a desk to something as spectacular as the original Nintendo NES. I was one of hundreds of thousands of people who were enthralled by the idea of not having to go to an arcade in order to play video games. I was hooked.”
Some of those early titles that “hooked” Harris were Super Mario Brothers, which he says was a “gamechanger”, and the boxing game Punch-Out!! “That was super fun because you could learn the patterns of the different boxers to know how to beat them,” he said.
These days, Harris sees video games as “a great opportunity to connect with your kids.” He and the family play on the Nintendo Switch, and frequently take the device with them in the car and to different cities to enjoy “friendly competition between family members no matter where we are.”
As for the Nintendo commercial, Harris says: “I never thought that as a parent I would be filming a commercial for a game system that I loved when I was younger.” Calling Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain a “super fit” for his family — which includes husband David Burtka and twins Gideon and Harper — he says it “allows us to play games together [and] to hone our skills independently.”
Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain releases Dec. 3. View the commercial below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Ad8WHfUtI
