The Making Of Of...
How embarrassing mocap sessions and MTV helped form gaming’s most relatable heroines
How embarrassing mocap and MTV helped form coming-of-age supernatural drama Life Is Strange
Format 360, Android, iOS, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One Developer Dontnod Entertainment Publisher Square Enix, Black Wing Foundation Origin France Release 2015 (360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One), 2017 (iOS), 2018 (Android)
Max Caulfield and Chloe Price are two of the most beloved characters in videogames. The winsome awkwardness and authenticity of the teenage best friends-slash-sweethearts has inspired endless fan art, fiction and cosplay. They feel more real than most – which is why it’s so amusing to hear that the Oregon teens started as a pair of Frenchmen in mocap suits. “We did the first motion capture together,” director Raoul Barbet says, looking over at writer Jean-Luc Cano. “He played Max and I played Chloe.” Cano also played Price’s hardboiled step-father, David Madsen: the scene, set in Price’s bedroom and centred around a dispute over her marijuana stash, was the first to be blocked out in coming-of-age drama Life Is Strange. “That’s when we realised we are terrible actors,” Barbet laughs.
There was no helping it at the time. Barbet and Cano made up two-thirds of a skeleton team that Dontnod had sent off to work on an experimental side-project. The studio had just released Capcom-published action-adventure Remember Me – “It wasn’t a huge success, and Dontnod was in quite a difficult situation,” Barbet recalls. The studio head singled out one of its more unusual mechanics as something worthy of further exploration: the protagonist’s ability to rewind and alter memories. Barbet, Cano and Michel Koch were pulled aside, while the rest of the developers continued to work on another triple-A effort. “They said, ‘We really like your minds, and what you’ve done with Remember Me’,” Cano says. “‘So make a small game, and the only thing you have to do is use the rewind mechanic.’”
They locked themselves in a room and began to think. Cano, also a writer for films and TV, “wanted to make a game written like a TV show,” he tells us. It was 2013, and Telltale Games was at the peak of its success. “There was a cliffhanger at the end of every episode, and you had to wait for the next one,” Cano recalls, excitedly. “So that’s what we wanted to do: the story of Arcadia Bay, and Max and Chloe, with a presentation where it’s like Heavy Rain mixed with Telltale Games’ branching stuff, but with the emotion of Gone Home.” He had also just become a father. “Jean-Luc asked a really good question about Max’s story, and what it means to become an adult and live with your choices,” Barbet says. Cano continues: “You know the story of coming of age – no one’s going to tell you, ‘You’re ready now, you’re grown up, you’re an adult’. So when we have this character who is able to rewind time, I thought it was a good metaphor for not wanting to assume the decision you’ve made. So basically, the story came from the gameplay.”
Indeed, one of the team’s first meetings about Life Is Strange revolved around whether to give its heroine the ability to stop time, instead of rewinding it. So Caulfield could physically pick up objects or move people to alter events? “That was one of the premises,” Cano says. Another was to have the player hop between episodes to solve puzzles: in the first episode, you’d play from the protagonist’s perspective, in the second, another character’s, and so on. “And so in the first episode, you could lock a door,” he explains. “You play the second episode, and the door is locked – but you could go back into the first episode and unlock it. But it was basically only mechanical. It wasn’t about stories, about feelings.” It was a realisation that helped them rule out the ‘freezing time’ idea, too: ironically, there was more power to the idea that Caulfield’s supernatural ability was linked to feelings of indecision and regret, rather than simply allowing her to smack a coffee cup out of someone’s hand.
The team’s goal, after all, was to build upon the games that had struck them most, from studios such as Telltale and Quantic Dream – but to explore social issues and difficult themes in a slightly more realistic way. “It had to be as sincere and accurate as possible, so we did a lot of research,” Cano says. Yet again, television was an inspiration to him; the team watched many episodes of MTV programme If You Really Knew Me. It aimed to deconstruct the stereotypes of social cliques by documenting the lives of individual American students, before showing the final, often personally revelatory film to their high-school classmates. “And they said, ‘If you knew me, you’d know that everyone’s calling me a freak, but my parents just got divorced and my father just died,’” Cano says. “You have the prettiest girl in high school: ‘If you knew me, you’d know I have a problem with food and I make myself throw up.’ Everyone is sharing their own problems; it’s not about category. So that was a huge inspiration for us. I remember my years in high school, Michel and Raoul also – but we tried to be like, ‘Okay, it’s not about us – it’s about kids today, and what they are facing now.’”
Online harassment, teen pregnancy, daterape drugs, suicide, disability and even assisted death – from the beginning, Life Is Strange was intended to tackle taboo topics. “In a game, I think everyone on the team brings something of themselves,” Barbet says. “The character of Kate, I remember, was really important for me. At that moment, in France, we had a lot of bad news about social-media harassment, and teenagers suffering with depression.” Pushed to the brink by the online bullying she suffers after being drugged at a party, Kate Marsh threatens to kill herself. Only the player, as Caulfield, is capable of convincing Marsh to step down from the ledge. Although Cano can’t remember who came up with the idea of Marsh calling Caulfield’s phone earlier in the episode – players can either choose to answer the call, or to ignore it so as not to antagonise Price – but recognises it as crucial to the ensuing scene’s impact. “You feel like she commits suicide a little bit because of you,” he says. “The main idea of the scene was how to make the player feel responsible, even if it’s not their fault. How can we make people understand that harassment
“YOU KNOW THE STORY OF COMING OF AGE – NO ONE’S GOING TO TELL YOU, ‘YOU’RE READY NOW, YOU’RE GROWN UP’”