When it comes to making engaging gaming & extreme sports films, Devin Super Tramp is the best in the business. He’s the brains behind Sonic & Mario Parkour videos, Zelda, Metroid, & Mario Kart in real-life films, Pokémon Horror, Super Smash Brothers reimagined, and so many other amazing films that have taken the internet by storm. His videos have led to him working with Universal Studios, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and many more amazing names in the world of film and gaming, and Devin joined us on the Retrospect Podcast to talk about his love of retro gaming, all things film making, and how he repurposed some vehicles he made for Mad Max and turned them into karts for Mario and the gang!
The following interview is made up of extracts from the transcript of our podcast interview with Devin Super Tramp . If you enjoy the article below, then definitely check out the full episode and hear Devin’s excitement over meeting Miyamoto, working with the crew of Jurassic Park, and how he gets his ideas in front of the companies he wants to work with!
Table of Contents
Getting To Know Devin Graham, aka Devin Super Tramp
Retro Dodo: Thanks for joining us, Devin. I’m sure all of our readers will already know who you are, but if you wouldn’t mind kicking off with a brief introduction into you and your work that would be great!
Devin: Awesome let’s do it, bring it on! Yeah, my name’s Devin Graham, I’m known as Devin Super Tramp on social media. I’ve been making YouTube videos for the last 15 years. I have six and a half million followers on YouTube and I just travel the world doing cool content anywhere from video games in real life to extreme sports stunts, to puppies coming out of Christmas boxes… that kind of covers the whole spectrum. And a lot of nature videos too around the world. So essentially I just capture whatever I think is cool. I’m a gamer at heart though, so a lot of my stuff kind of goes to that kind of route which is why I think I’ve been brought on for something like this. But it’s definitely given me these amazing opportunities to work with all these amazing brands that I love as well, so it’s been a fun, fun adventure so far and going strong… so we’ll see where it goes next.
RD: Now I know our community will want to know all about your love of gaming and the movies you’ve made about your favourite series, but let’s start off with why you got into making films. Was there something that drove you to pick up a camera? Was there a movie that ignited your passion?
Devin: Yeah, so I’ve always made movies ever since I had my dad’s old VHS camera. I’m talking a big clunky thing. Big, red and black. But I would just make a lot of stop-motion videos, and a lot of music videos with my siblings. I love James Bond, so a lot of kind of like espionage-type films. I mean, I look at it now, it’s all kind of stupid stuff now. But that definitely got me into it. It was like the gateway drug for making movies. As far as movies that inspired me to want to make movies, though, I’d say Jurassic Park was the catalyst for that. I loved the original Jurassic Park. I remember going to theaters with my dad and just being mind-blown by how amazing it was. And then, of course, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, those are the other kind of ones that I kind of learned from.
RD: Yeah, you started doing quite a lot of snowboarding stuff, didn’t you? And then youf took a move from being in front of the camera to behind it, right?
Devin: Yeah, I was hardcore into snowboarding. Not that I was amazing by any means, but I broke my back snowboarding, I broke my legs snowboarding. That was all high school days. And we would go out there and we’d be filming and stuff like that. But I honestly have never liked being in front of a camera except for capturing my own little stuff. For me though, it’s always been about showing other people and other people’s amazing talents. And for me, the secret is finding incredible people because it makes your cinematography or your filmmaking look way better too. So I’ve lucked out by always finding great people.
Video Gaming History
Retro Dodo: All right, let’s jump into retro gaming because I’m sure you’ve done plenty of podcasts talking about film and stuff and we want a unique angle. What was your first video game memory?
Devin: It’s the original NES. So it’s Mario Brothers 1 and Duck Hunt, and we didn’t own a NES at the time. It was our neighbors that had it, and we would just go over there like every day and play the NES. And then like we’d figure out like the warp pipes and all the secrets, like can you duck here and you’ll go through the wall here, all that type of stuff.
Devin: Then eventually we got a NES and then a couple of people down the street got the NES, and then everyone was just like sharing secrets of warp pipes and all that, but it was definitely Mario Brothers 1, Mario Brothers 2, Mario Brothers 3, Duck Hunt – those were definitely my kind of games. Then my cousin was a hardcore Sega fan, so he had like Sonic 2, and then we’d just go there all the time. I remember being mind blown by that as well, so then we eventually got a Sega… and then I love Donkey Kong Country, so then that was like my gateway into the Super Nintendo era… and the rest is history.
Retro Dodo: I get a feeling from your videos that you’re a diehard Nintendo fan at heart. If you were to pick one franchise, would it be Nintendo?
Devin: It’s definitely Nintendo for sure. Out of all the different video game systems, Nintendo is definitely like my core. I play PlayStation and I play Xbox, but not as much on the Xbox. Like last night I was playing God of War Ragnarok. I’m trying to beat that right now. And I’m a little behind because once you make YouTube videos for a living, it’s like a 24-7 job. So you kind of have to put these other things to the side. So I’m slowly doing them when I have time. But yeah, for me, Nintendo. If I wasn’t going to be a filmmaker, I was either going to be an astronaut or a video game designer. I’m not smart enough to be an astronaut and the other thing was that I would love to create for Nintendo, so if I wasn’t gonna be filmmaking, it was a college in Washington called DigiPen which is where a lot of game developers went to learn.
Devin: I always wanted to work with Nintendo, but it’s been amazing because I’ve done so many things with Nintendo directly, and we have a partnership. And they’ve hired me to do awesome projects. I didn’t know how to get into Nintendo’s mind, so I created a Mario Kart in real life video and I put a lot of money into it. We made our own custom go-karts that all looked like straight from Mario Kart, put it on YouTube, and ended up getting 30 plus million views. And then Nintendo reached out to me and said ‘Hey, Devin, we’d love to hire you to promote…’ or actually the first time was when they said ‘We want to fly you out to New York City to meet Miyamoto.’
Retro Dodo: Whoa, no way!
Devin: Yeah, I got to meet him and then the producer, Eiji Aonuma from Zelda. I got to interview them and they said, ‘We want to fly you all for the unveiling of the new Nintendo system.’ So I got a plane out to New York City where I got to like… interview them and play the Switch before anyone else did. And then that was kind of like essentially the start of my relationship with Nintendo, getting to meet all these incredible legends. And when they called me, I was in tears about it. I was shaking over it. Very few people I’m nervous to meet, but those are the people that I’ve looked up to, the Walt Disney of video games in my mind.
Retro Dodo: Amazing! What are they like as people? I can’t imagine just sitting in a room with Miyamoto and Aonuma!
Devin: Yeah, I was definitely like on cloud nine, but it was like I got to go in a room and I could have one other plus one. My brother’s a diehard Nintendo fan too, so they flew him out as well. So me and my brother, Corey, and we were just like in this room with like us, me, Miyamoto and Aonuma, and a translator, and like one other Nintendo rep, and we could just like talk to them about anything. I had seven minutes. So for me, it was like seven minutes in heaven.
Devin: They normally don’t sign things; I’m not someone that like wants things signed, but I went to the Nintendo store in New York City and I bought a 3DS, brand new one… it’s never been played, and I had them both sign it. Miyamoto drew a picture of Mario on it with his signature and Aonuma drew the Triforce with his signature, so it’s never been opened. The 3DS is just like perfectly there in my office back home, but for me they’re just super cool like relatable people. They just seemed very humble.
Devin’s Gaming Collection
Retro Dodo: Going back, you mentioned a lot of consoles. Did you ever get into handhelds, game boys, that kind of stuff? Was that your cup of tea?
Devin: I love Game Boy. Game Boy Color, not so much. 3DS, definitely. But the original Game Boy, like, my dad was a grocery store manager and they needed a mascot, the guys that wear big costumes. And I was little, I don’t know a 10-year-old maybe. So I wore this ‘Wonder Bread’ costume. So like a bread costume, and I wore it for three days and that’s how I earned my Game Boy. So I still have my Game Boy to this day. But yeah, definitely for me, Game Boy was another huge part of my video game development. But I mean, for me, NES, Super Nintendo, Sega, those were like my go-to’s back in the day, probably even more so than I’d say like handheld systems.
Retro Dodo: You showed us your collection on Instagram and took us on a brief walkthrough. That walkthrough has been in our dreams every night since! Rows upon rows of games, pinball tables – we knew we had to get you on the podcast there and then!
Devin: I’ll have to send you a few more videos because I didn’t show you my office with all my figures of all like my Zelda figures… and they’re like, I’m talking like big statues. I’m a hardcore collector, and when I buy a game I don’t sell it and buy it back. When you see it in my collection it’s the original that I bought that I had at that time. I was lucky for some reason to always take care of all my boxes and everything like that so everything’s in this phenomenal condition. But I definitely have probably more than most people and I have it displayed in my office at home and then even our office downstairs, I also have stuff displayed too, but I don’t want to get it too crazy because other people work here too and I don’t want them to feel like throwing everything Nintendo at them.
Devin: And I even have a room in our house that’s just a dedicated retro room. So it has like an old CRTV and it’s all hooked up through like old school cables and stuff like that. And I have like the original Nintendo, the GameCube, Super Nintendo, Sega, like it’s just all the old retro that… that’s my retro room. So it’s been kind of a fun little room. It is cool because when people come to my house… I don’t always talk about video game stuff. It’s usually like extreme sports or parkour and stuff like that. But then when they come to my house and they walk downstairs, the downstairs is like my game cave, I guess you could say. And they’re like, ‘What?’ It’s the side of me they don’t know anything about.
Making Gaming Films
Retro Dodo: So when you’re building your sets for your gaming videos, are you literally bringing out your switch and looking at it in that perspective or looking at screenshots and trying to get the replication as perfect as you can?
Devin: It kind of depends… for example the Mario parkour we just did or the one I am releasing in a couple weeks called ‘Into the Mario-verse’ which goes through all of Mario’s history… it starts off with Mario Kar. Toad gets kidnapped by Waluigi and then they jump through a pipe and then all of a sudden they’re in Mario Brothers 1 world where like all the VFX and everything is all like 2D animated, and then they go into Mario Odyssey, and then Mario Galaxy. Mario Galaxy we have it like it looks like they’re on a little planet, like a tiny planet. Then in Mario 64, like I have the pigment, things that make each of the games iconic. So I had all the different screenshots and I actually even have it where when he goes through the pipe his costume changes. Like the original Mario, his overalls were a different color. And then he goes from blue and red and then the overalls become the opposite color based on what game he’s going through. So I had like all those screen references on my phone.
Devin: I think the one where it was like, we need to be exact is when we did our Smash Brothers one. We built like a $20,000 American money set, just the set itself, and we wanted it to look straight out of the game. So we had different platforms and stuff like that. And then we got a high-quality background of what the set looked like. Then we had someone else, we hired a different company to rebuild that for us. But it is a case-by-case basis.
Retro Dodo: The planning that goes into your videos and the attention to detail is wild. Obviously, your hardcore Mario fans know what color the costumes are, just like the hardcore Zelda fans know exactly what sword Link is using in every single game, so the fact that you put in that extra attention to detail is what separates your videos from the competition. I was watching your Metroid Prime 4 video because I’ve been waiting for that game for so long. There’s no chance of releasing Metroid Prime 4 anytime soon, is there? I don’t know when we’re gonna get that. You can’t time that one, can you? But I was watching that and I was like, that’s the closest thing I’ve had to anything that resembles Metroid Prime 4 at all for years.
Devin: So that was an interesting one because that one made me a fan of Metroid and I didn’t know a ton about Metroid going into it. And that’s like a rare exception. So for me, before I did that I played the Super Nintendo one…Super Metroid. I tried to play the original Metroid, but I couldn’t do it on the NES. It was just too… I don’t know, I couldn’t connect with it, and I played Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2 on the GameCube. But that was one where the one thing I didn’t have right on that was Metroid’s can’t really exist in cold worlds and we had the Metroids coming out, and that was the big complaint I got as people are like ‘You can’t have Metroids in cold worlds.’ So it was like… I tried to be as much and did all my research, I played three games to prepare me for it, and I still got that one wrong.
Retro Dodo: Yeah, but who knows? We don’t even know what’s gonna happen in Metroid Prime 4, so perhaps they can exist in cold worlds now. Nintendo might see that and think ‘Really, Metroid’s in Cold Worlds?’ and you’ll say, ‘I told you, I knew this was gonna happen!’
Devin: One step ahead, yeah! That’s what happened with our Fortnite video, because in our Fortnite video we have Star Wars characters. We even have Yoda come on at the end, and then the camera pans up and it shows the Death Star, and now all the Star Wars world is in the Fortnite world. So people were like ‘You predicted it way in advance!’
Thanks to Devin for joining us on the Retrospect Podcast. There’s much more content to soak up, so make sure to check out the full episode using the player below. Don’t forget to follow the podcast to get updates on new episodes too!
