Turning to Hollywood For Video Game Plotlines
When Pete Samuels, a founder and the chief executive of Supermassive Games, began working on a survival horror adventure video game called Until Dawn in 2015, he knew he wanted the story to unfold like that of a horror film.
So he turned to Hollywood. Mr. Samuels sought out Larry Fessenden, an American screenwriter and director whose credits include the horror films “Wendigo” and “The Last Winter,” and the screenplay for “Orphanage,” an in- development English language remake of the Spanish horror film “El Orfanato” from the director Guillermo del Toro.
“The gaming audience is growing, and tastes are broadening,” Mr. Samuels said.
In an era of prestige television, high- quality streaming services and indie films that sometimes haul in blockbuster box office receipts, video games are facing stiff narrative competition. So game creators are increasingly turning to film and television writers to help craft their stories.
In 2014, Sledgehammer Games worked with the Hollywood screenwriter Mark Boal (his credits include “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”) on the story for the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. That same year, the former Pixar writer Stephan Bugaj helped Telltale Games develop a narrative for its adventure game series Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.
In December, Naughty Dog, the studio behind blockbuster action-adventure franchises like Uncharted and The Last of Us, announced that Halley Gross, a writer and story editor on HBO’s “Westworld,” would help write the studio’s game The Last of Us Part II. The game will follow its two protagonists, Ellie and Joel, as they fight off zombielike monsters in a post-apocalyptic world.
But writing for a video game can present hurdles. That’s because unlike film and TV audiences, gaming audiences are not passive spectators.
With The Last of Us Part II, Ms. Gross approached that challenge together with Neil Druckmann, Naughty Dog’s creative director. Ms. Gross, who is a gamer, said she signed on for the project because it was an opportunity to learn more about making games while working with characters she was already familiar with.
“I believe storytelling in games has the opportunity to create an unmatched level of empathy,” Ms. Gross said. “You’re not just a spectator. You’re experiencing someone’s journey firsthand.”
Ms. Gross said they approached the game similar to the way they would a season of television, brainstorming the entire story line and figuring out major milestones for the narrative. That’s where the similarities between writing for television and games ended.
“In television, you’re collaborating with other writers,” Ms. Gross said, and “only once the script is in a fairly locked form do other departments get involved,” she explained. “At Naughty Dog, each narrative beat is infused with not just the ideas of the writers, but also by design, art, and more.”
For now, building robust and dynamic stories can still be difficult, especially in games that have several outcomes depending on what each player decides. When developing the
In search of an enthralling story for a first-person shooter.
story for Until Dawn, Mr. Fessenden worked with a collaborator, the writer and director Graham Reznick, whose credits include the 2008 horror feature film “I Can See You.” Together, they crafted a creepy cabin-in- the-woods story focused on a group of teenagers.
The game was conceived as a first-person game, which Mr. Reznick said felt “much less cinematic.” Supermassive Games then decided to switch to a third-person perspective, and began using techniques usually reserved for films, like fixed camera angles. “This let us actually write dialogue and express ideas closer to how we would in film,” he said.
In the final version, players can alternate among characters, making decisions that affect the outcome. The game, with the voices and likenesses of the actors Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, was released on the PlayStation 4 in 2015. It won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for its originality.