Before his death, Mats Steen spent tens of thousands of hours as the dashing rogue, Ibelin.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival back in January and will be available for streaming on Netflix in October, tells the story of Mats Steen, who died of a rare degenerative muscular disease at age 25. When Steen passed in 2014, his parents feared that their son had spent his life in isolation, only to discover that he’d built a network of friendships as Ibelin, the philandering nobleman rogue detective he spent years roleplaying as in World of Warcraft.
“The film takes us on a journey through the breadth of Mats Steen’s adventurous online life, introducing us to Ibelin, his charismatic World of Warcraft persona, and underscores how community and soulful relationships can transcend the boundaries of the physical world,” Netflix said.
According to a 2019 BBC article, Steen spent the last few years of his life unable to leave his family home. Unbeknownst to his parents, he’d spent that time with his close friends in World of Warcraft, some of whom had attended his funeral in 2014.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin chronicles the tens of thousands of hours Steen lived as Ibelin, reconstructing his life in Azeroth from blog posts he’d written and interviews with his former guildmates—guildmates who’d known nothing about his illness until late in his life. To recreate episodes from Ibelin’s in-game roleplay history, filmmaker Benjamin Ree worked with animators to reenact those moments using World of Warcraft models and environments with Blizzard’s blessing.
According to an accompanying story on Netflix’s Tudum, Ree had reached out to Steen’s parents about the possibility of creating a documentary after reading about their son in the 2019 BBC story, and soon experienced a moment of serendipity. While watching the Steens’ home videos, Ree was shocked to see himself and his family on one of the tapes. Their families, it turned out, had shared a friend group when Steen and Ree were young children. “I’m not a religious person, but I almost became religious at that moment,” Ree said.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin will be available for streaming Netflix on October 25, 2024.
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