Daily Inspiration Quote by John Cleese

Cleese’s “astounding” isn’t just mild surprise; it’s the tell of someone watching the cultural center of gravity slide out from under the old gods of cinema. Coming from an actor forged in an era when a film was the event and everything else was marketing exhaust, the line captures a belated recognition: the tie-in isn’t a side hustle anymore, it’s co-equal authorship. He’s not praising games so much as registering a power shift that feels slightly indecent to the traditional hierarchy of “serious” art.

The key move is labor. Cleese focuses on obsession and time spent - “2 or 3 years” - because that’s the metric performers and filmmakers respect: devotion, craft, the monastic grind. By describing game development as the same kind of fixation a film crew brings to a movie, he quietly rebukes the old dismissal of games as juvenile merch. The subtext is professional jealousy and professional awe braided together: how is the “supplement” commanding the same creative life-force as the main text?

Context matters. Cleese is a comedy legend whose work depends on timing, control, and a fixed sequence of beats. Games are the opposite: replayable, non-linear, audience-driven. His amazement hints at a broader anxiety in entertainment industries - that meaning and prestige are migrating toward experiences people inhabit, not stories they simply watch. In that frame, the “video game” isn’t a product; it’s a new kind of stage where the audience becomes the performer, and the movie, for once, has to share the spotlight.