The gamer taking China by storm
Former soap star brought up in Stockport hairdressers helps create hit video game
AWRITER who was raised in a Stockport hairdressers and went on to be a soap star says her next great adventure is just beginning – being a smash video game hit in China.
That’s because she has written the story for Overcooked 2 – which sees players work together to conquer a variety of culinary challenges.
Such is the game’s high-stakes nature and popularity among couples in China, it has earned the nickname ‘Divorce Kitchen’.
It’s fair to say that Gemma Langford, 41, has had an unconventional route into the games industry.
“I’ve always been a gamer, and loved video games, but I was never part of that world,” Gemma, who now lives in Chorlton, explains.
Although Gemma wasn’t in the games scene, she was born into a fertile ground for storytelling – her parents’ hair salon.
“It was a Stockport institution!”, she beams.
“My parents had a hairdressers called A Cut Ahead, it was on Brown Street where Redrock is now. If you’ve got any background in Stockport, you’ll know someone who has been to it – my dad was Big John, he was a boxer, and my mum was a blonde dollybird.
“I saw people grow up in that shop, it’s definitely where I learned how people talked. It was one of those shops where everyone talked to each other, there was this constant overlap of conversation. All my upbringing was stories.
“Someone asked me recently what my first job was, and I guess it was when I was brushing up hair in the shop when I was five.”
It’s clear that having spent so much time as a fly on the wall, Gemma’s enthusiasm and energy for people comes naturally to her.
Her personality and affability made her next career choice obvious – moving south to drama school.
“I got a grant to go, it was back in Tony Blair time – there was two years when he was doing this grant, and then they pulled it,” she explains.
“It was really devastating.
“In the end, we had to write letters to celebrities, saying ‘please will you pay for my last year at drama school’, and I got Dickie Attenborough.
“He’s a lovely man, so every time I watch Jurassic Park, I’m like ‘mate!’”
After leaving drama school in 2003, Gemma won parts in soap operas.
She portrayed various police officers on Coronation Street during the mid-noughties, before landing the role of Gemma Crosby on Hollyoaks over Christmas 2007.
Although she only played the character, who ‘was the wife of a paedophile swimming instructor’, for four episodes, it provided creative impetus for Gemma, who eventually moved from acting to writing scripts.
Initially focusing on theatre in the years after her soap appearances, Gemma’s first play – which she penned ‘just to see how it would go’ – was longlisted for The Bruntwood Prize for playwriting by the Royal Exchange Theatre, the largest competition of its kind in the UK.
“I didn’t know anything about writing, nothing, and I was like ‘God, if I’ve got longlisted, people are awful at writing!’,” she jokes. “That was the first step that got me listed to being a BAFTA breakthrough Brit.”
Eventually, her friendship with Phil Duncan and Oli De-Vine, who are part of the creative team behind Overcooked and Overcooked 2, led Gemma into video games.
“They were making the original Overcooked, and I just helped them as a friend, just taking the game to expos, showing the game, helping them test the game,” Gemma says.
“As a jobbing writer, I do a lot of admin jobs, as a lot of artists do, so I picked up a lot of stuff.
“It started with a spreadsheet here and there, but as it got on, Overcooked started doing really well.
“Then they were at the point of asking for an actual writer to [come in and] write the actual dialogue and story, and they asked if I wanted to do that as well.
“That was when I fell in love with writing for games. It’s just so much fun.
“When you write for games, you are writing for so many people. It’s really different to writing for theatre or radio, you know... but there is a similarity.
“The thing between radio and games, there is a physicality to it. When you are writing for radio, you are trying to make the person feel everything without seeing anything – so you’re very much writing in sound effects, trying to move a person without moving them,” she says.
“In a way writing for games is a physical medium, you’re matching moments of great tension with moments of emotion.
“I’ve found doing that has bled into my theatre work – I’ve started to think how is the audience breathing, what emotion are they carrying at this point. I think video games taught me that.
“In theatre and radio, you can very much be a primadonna, you can say ‘I am going to write my vision’.
“In games it’s got to be collaborative. Your ego has got to go out the window because it’s down to gameplay. If the game isn’t fun to play, no one will care about your story.”
Gemma’s major involvement in the games world has been with independent studio, Ghost Town Games. It was founded in 2015 by Phil Duncan and Oli DeVine, two developers formerly of Frontier Games.
It is based in Manchester, and is now run by Gemma, who is also its lead writer.
The studio is still bouncing off its three nominations at the BAFTA Games Awards 2019, with another title in the pipeline.
“It’s been a whirlwind few years,” Gemma smiles. “I’m in this lovely position.”
‘When you write for games you are writing for so many people. It’s different to theatre or radio’