Metro – it’s been a journey
Author Dmitry Glukhovsky on turning his books into videogames
Metro Exodus is out this month but we’ve been fans of the series for years. Despite the place the Metro titles have in players’ hearts, the series didn’t begin life as a game. Metro 2033 was originally a novel, written by Russian author and political journalist Dmitry Glukhovsky and made available online in 2002 (publication came later).
Since then, we’ve had a trilogy of novels (Metro 2033, 2034, and 2035), a trilogy of games (Metro 2033, Last Light, and Exodus) and the books have been optioned for a Hollywood adaptation. While a lot of authors end up lamenting the process their books are subjected to when they’re adapted into videogames (we’re looking at you, Andrzej “The Witcher” Sapkowski), Glukhovsky embraces the process and results.
“From the very beginning, I didn’t mind at all that the games would be different from the books – I understand that they’re a totally different medium and I understand that you need to change things when you adapt a book into a film or anything else,” he tells us as we sit down to chat.
“In the first game, 4A Games took the book and tried to do a straight adaptation: taking as much of the story as possible and putting it into the game. Then, when it was done, they sent me the dialogue, and I read and changed quite a lot. In the Russian version, I changed almost every line, in the English version, a little less.”
For the second game, the process was different. Metro 2034 didn’t lend itself to a first-person shooter, so 4A asked Glukhovsky to write a new story. Glukhovsky was happy to continue Artyom’s tale for Last Light.
“I wanted this story to follow Artyom, so in Last Light I wrote dialogue or monologues with NPCs that showed they have rich, personal lives: dreams, hopes, regrets. I thought this sort of content helps build the ambience. It’s not just visuals that communicate this story, the characters and your interaction with them is instrumental in portraying this world.”
Glukhovsky believes that games traditionally have a ‘psychopathic’
I WANT TO MAKE GAMES THAT TELL COMPELLING STORIES.
approach to NPCs: that they train us to see them as objects, instruments or goals, that they are purely functional in a gameplay sense.
“My mission in the second game was to make the gamer forget that they were gaming. Games have a much longer outreach than my books, and I wanted to use that as a tool of my eternal quest to make gamers and readers think critically. I am not ashamed of using critical messages in gaming. I was always taught that good science fiction should be a metaphor to discuss something crucial: it makes quite boring things (equal response to totalitarian regimes, reaction to propaganda, reluctance to accept truths) easier to communicate.”
That philosophy is clear in Exodus. The newest game focuses on the world above ground, on the factions vying with each other over political (and seemingly religious) beliefs. Exodus moves from the corridorbased layout of the previous games to a more zonal, semi-open world setup, and that’s given Glukovsky and 4A room to let to the player experience the NPCs and their lives in their own way, as agents in a tale, rather than seeing the world on rails through Arytom’s eyes.
“A lot of movies romanticise armed conflict, and a lot of games oversimplify it. I want to make games that tell compelling personal stories and we, at the team of Metro, are the only ones that do that right now, I think. We understand the beauty of storytelling and how that can be used to incredible effect in games like The Last Of Us or BioShock, and as this focus on storytelling gets picked up in the industry, I’m incredibly proud we were one of the first to approach it in the way we did… especially when it comes to first-person shooters.”
Playing Exodus, you can see what Glukhovsky and 4A are reaching for: the thought-provoking narrative, the focus on the human element of in-game characters, and the humane message that ties it all together. Turn to page 76 to see our in-depth review of Artyom’s latest adventure.