Minecraft novel fuses fiction, gaming
Max Brooks may have created new entertainment category with first brand-backed book
The protagonist of Max Brooks’ new fantasy novel doesn’t have a name, a gender or even normal human appendages. Instead of hands, the narrator has clumsy, flesh-toned cubes, just one more weird feature of the strange and unsettling world where the story unfolds, where everything — the sun, clouds, cows, mushrooms, watermelons — is composed of squares.
For the uninitiated, the setting may seem bizarre and disorienting, but Brooks isn’t writing for novices or lay readers. He’s writing for a very particular tribe: diehard devotees of the video game Minecraft.
Minecraft: The Island, which was released this month by the science fiction and fantasy publisher Del Rey, represents an unusual experiment in multiplatform brand extension. It marks the first officially sanctioned novel commissioned by Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind Minecraft, as the company seeks new ways to capitalize on the game’s enormous popularity. (To eliminate any doubt about the company’s consent, Mojang’s name and logo appear twice on the book’s cover, which bears the bland endorsement, “Mojang Official Product.”)
Unlike most video and computer games, Minecraft doesn’t have clearcut objectives or levels to ascend. Instead, it’s more like an elaborate digital Lego set that allows players to build whatever they like, designing their own castles, skyscrapers, un- derground bunkers and booby traps.
The open-ended nature of the game is a big part of its appeal. Since its release in 2011, Minecraft has sold more than 122 million copies and now has 55 million active monthly users. The game’s user base exploded so rapidly that in 2014, Microsoft bought the company for $2.5 billion (U.S).
As product spinoffs go, a series of novels seems like a natural step for Mojang, which already has a wildly successful publishing line of gaming manuals. (A feature film is also in the works, at Warner Bros.) Since 2013, the children’s publisher Scholastic has published 10 Minecraft titles, which have 25 million copies in print. On Amazon, there are thousands more unofficial titles that fans have self-published, including entire novels set inside the game.
“We had been thinking about fiction for a long time but wanted to make sure that it didn’t take away from people’s experience of the game, because everyone plays in a different way,” said Lydia Winters, Mojang’s brand director.
But commissioning a brand-approved Minecraft novel posed unique creative and commercial challenges. How do you create a story with a beginning, a middle and an end out of an open-ended game? And would gamers bother to pick up a nearly 300-page novel about Minecraft, when they could be spending their free time playing it?
Brooks — a cheerful, enthusiastic paranoiac who is obsessed with survival strategies, zombies, apocalyptic scenarios and plagues — wrote the story as a first-person, Robinson Crusoe-esque narrative, featuring an initially hapless character who is stranded on a strange island and has to build shelter, find food and fight off zombies and giant spiders, all features that exist in the game. When Mojang approached him to write a Minecraft novel in fall 2015, Brooks already had a track record as a best-selling author. The son of actors Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Max Brooks turned to fiction after a brief and unremarkable career in comedy writing, which included a stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live.
After he was fired from the show, he started writing chillingly realistic zombie fiction and found his calling. Two of his previous books, World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, have collectively sold more than 3.5 million copies, and World War Z, a faux oral history about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, was adapted into a feature film starring Brad Pitt.
Other successful authors might have brushed off an invitation to write a video game tie-in novel, an unabashedly commercial genre that some say amounts to little more than elaborate product placement. But Brooks happens to be an avid Minecraft player and jumped at the opportunity. He was determined to write a story that mirrored the experience of playing the game. He developed a plot that conformed to the Minecraft universe so closely that someone reading the book could recreate the narrative within the game and play along.
“I war-gamed out everything,” Brooks said in a recent interview from his home in Los Angeles. “My biggest fear was that somebody tries to play out my book and finds out it won’t work.”
In the process, he may have also created a strange new entertainment category, one that hovers somewhere between fan fiction, role-playing games and literature — a novel set in a game, that can itself be played within the game.
Like reverse adaptations of movies and TV shows (see, for example, novels based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and CSI), novels based on gaming franchises have long been a lucrative niche within the publishing industry.
Publishers have been releasing novels based on popular video games for decades, hoping to capture a slice of the medium’s huge fan base. Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, has published fictional series based on games like Halo, Doom and World of Warcraft, and has millions of copies of its video game tie-in novels in circulation. Other publishers have built fictional franchises based on games like Gears of War, Starcraft, BioShockand Tomb Raider.
“Especially with teenage boys, it’s one of the only ways we can get them to read,” said Keith Clayton, the associate publisher at Del Rey.
The plot was created for players, and perhaps parents and grandparents who want to understand the game’s appeal, Brooks said.
Above all, though, Brooks wrote it to satisfy his own creative impulses.
“Honestly, at the end of it all, I wrote it for me. I’m a fan first.”
“I war-gamed out everything. My biggest fear was that somebody tries to play out my book and finds out it won’t work.” MAX BROOKS