Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Quad Gods’ on Max, a Quietly Inspirational Documentary About the First-Ever All-Quadriplegic Esports Team

Although the documentary Quad Gods ( now streaming on Max ) profiles the first-ever all-quadriplegic Esports team, don’t expect the usual tropes of inspirational documentaries. Director Jess Jacklin takes a more nuanced and immersive approach as she follows three members of the Quad Gods through New York City, getting a feel for the lives they lead, their aspirations and the limitations they face – and shows us how adaptive gaming is therapeutic for these men, and more than just a means of escape or entertainment.

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The Gist: This documentary establishes its themes in one simple scene: The Quad Gods building their gaming avatars. These are men who’ve survived traumatic events and adapted to lives with significantly limited physical movement. They had to reinvent themselves. Creating a digital version of yourself that’s a fantastical warrior is fun if you’re not disabled, but for these people, it feels like a necessity. We meet Dr. David Putrino, known as “the Quadfather,” not because that’s his gaming handle, but because he’s a proponent of gaming-as-therapy for quadriplegics. His work at the Mt. Sinai Abilities Research Center asserts that outfitting quadriplegics with adaptive gear – modified controllers range from those controlled by mouth to pads with large buttons – and encouraging them to play video games helps them rebuild their oft-shattered mind-body connection. It’s also an ongoing therapeutic outlet that’s increasingly valuable in a medical system that too often adheres to a so-long-good-luck methodology, pushing quadriplegics quickly through rehab and then into a not-always-particularly-accommodating world, to fend for themselves for the rest of their lives.

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Jacklin spends much of the film getting to know three of the Quad Gods, based in New York City: Richard Jacobs (gamer handle Breadwinner1007) is the highly competitive leader of the Quad Gods, a single father who was shot by the men who robbed him. Prentice Cox (aka Mongoslade) is a former football player who suffered a terrible motorcycle accident, and now eyeballs the assistive exoskeleton at Mt. Sinai, hoping it’ll someday help him walk again. And Blake Hunt (aka Repnproof) is another former footballer who broke his neck on the field when he missed a tackle, and now zooms through the streets in his wheelchair, delivering food for Uber Eats. We hang out with them as they navigate New York, working and going on dates and convening for gaming sessions. They also share their struggles – how they lost friends, got addicted to painkillers, struggled with their self-worth. For them, the Quad Gods isn’t just therapeutic practice, but an opportunity for camaraderie.

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Jacklin doesn’t indulge a traditional narrative that tracks the Quad Gods to a big climactic gaming tournament. For lack of a better word, she embeds the documentary crew into the three men’s lives: Richard drives an adaptive car on a track – the first time he’s been behind the wheel since his injury – and he’s moved to tears, having long believed that he’d never drive again. Blake goes on a dinner-and-movie date with a quadriplegic woman, and she – rather adorably, I might add – holds onto the back of his wheelchair as he zooms the two of them through the city. Prentice visits a specialist for an exam to determine if he physically qualifies to try standing and walking with the exoskeleton – and gets good news. We get good, long looks into their lives as individuals and as the Quad Gods, and underneath that, get a sense of what “winning” means to them. It’s powerful stuff.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Excellent Netflix doc Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution , about the origins of a vital human-rights movement, is a nice companion piece for Quad Gods .

Performance Worth Watching: I’ll use this space as a reminder that showing vulnerability – like the subjects of this documentary do – opens yourself up love.

Memorable Dialogue: Richard on the empowerment he felt when he learned the therapeutic attributes of gaming, and forming an Esports team: “I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was almost an immediate sense of belonging.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Quad Gods is the documentary-as-hangout-movie, Jacklin letting its most powerful scenes shape themselves through simple observation. The director sometimes employs talking-head interviews with her three primary subjects and others in their periphery – friends, family, physicians, experts – but they’re supplemental; she also uses Into the Spider-Verse -meets-video-game animation as a way to imagine a world where these men are virtual warriors, their avatars in motion. In reality, they’re just as robust: Take the slightly harrowing scene where Blake and some friends navigate their wheelchairs through New Jersey streets zooming with traffic – they aren’t exactly disability-friendly – on their way to a convention (“comic con for wheelchairs,” is how it’s described) and end up getting a police escort. Or the moment where Richard meets with a quadriplegic teen to tell him all about the Quad Gods and adaptive gaming, the necessary first step toward helping this kid lift himself up.

So the film is inspirational in a less overt and obvious manner. Jacklin presents her subjects’ stories with the empathy and complexity they deserve, capturing vulnerable moments that reveal the joys and pains of their lives: After a rough gaming session in preparation for a tournament, the intensely competitive Richard butts heads with Blake, who’s content to take losing in stride in lieu of making winning be everything. They visit with the family of a quadriplegic friend who died suddenly after an infection. They discuss smoking marijuana as a means to assuage chronic pain or tame uncontrollable spasms. They roll down NYC sidewalks and pass a shady massage parlor and we hear one of them joke, “I’m thinking a staircase is standing between me and a happy ending.” Quad Gods isn’t about winning the big tournament, which implies a beginning and an end; it’s about the process of getting better, of getting through life in spite of its difficulties, and it does so with great empathy.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Quad Gods is a stylistically and thematically fascinating documentary memorable for its emotional honesty.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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