The Press Box - Ep. 212: 'Achievement Oriented' on 'Batman,' the Telltale Model, and the Storytelling of 'Firewatch'

Episode Date: November 25, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk about how Telltale Games created a successful assembly line for licensed, episodic adventure games, and report their impressions of 'Batman: The Telltale Series' (1:33). Then, they bring on Telltale alum and Campo Santo co-founder Sean Vanaman to discuss how he wrote 'The Walking Dead' and 'Firewatch' (15:55) and what he has in mind for the 'Firewatch' film adaptation (54:53). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Today's episode of Channel 33 is brought to you by Seekek, the presenting sponsor for my podcast, as well as the only fan-friendly app for buying and selling tickets for sports and music. With just two taps on your phone, you can instantly buy Seekkeek tickets to an event, and you can enter that event just using your phone. No paper tickets. Drop your old ticket app. Use one that's built for 2016.

Download the free SeatGeek app or go to Seekkekekekeek.com. Hello. And welcome to Achievement-oriented, the gaming podcast from Channel 33. My name is Ben Lindberg, and I'm a writer for The Ringer. And on the other line, this podcast adapts to the choices he makes. It's my ringer colleague, Jason Concepcion. Hey, Jason. We've done it.

We've made a hard choice to be here with you. And, you know, we took a lot of time thinking about that choice. And then we clicked on the choice. We selected it from the dialogue wheel, and we're here with you today. And we will all remember that choice. So we hope. that you all had tolerable or better thanksgivings and were able to sneak away from any uncomfortable family conversations and hide in front of a screen somewhere. This is our second

themed episode of the week. So we talked about stealth games on Tuesday. And today we're talking about storytelling and what would traditionally have been referred to as adventure games. And you can't really talk about that in 2016 without talking about telltale, the developer that has made adventure games into a formula and a factory. And later in this episode, we're going to talk to Sean Vanaman, who used to be a writer for Telltale and was the creative force behind the first season of The Walking Dead, which was, of course, universally acclaimed and great and really sort of springboarded. And better than the show?

Yeah, you don't even have to say shish. That's fine with me. And then he left Telltale to go start his own studio, Camposanto, and, And he then wrote Firewatch. It's a first-person adventure game. It came out in February. It's on every platform. And it follows the story of a guy named Henry, who decides to spend a summer as a fire lookout in a national forest.

And various events befall him. It's got a great story and great storytelling. And it's been a big success. And it's definitely one of our favorite games of the year. So we're going to talk to him about the storytelling techniques he used in Firewatch and also just in video games in general. So that'll be kind of the developer's presentation. perspective. And first, we're going to talk about our experience with Telltale. We have both played

the Walking Dead games. We've both played the Game of Thrones games. I have now caught up on the Batman games, which are up through four episodes. Four out of five have been released already. You were not able to play yet because Telltale discriminates against Mac owners. As many game developers still do. Yeah. So just to pull back of it, I mean, what? Telltale has managed to accomplish over the past decade plus. And I don't think many people necessarily realize how far back they go. This is a company that goes back to 2004, lots of LucasArts veterans, and they started out doing

more traditional adventure games, Sam and Max and Monkey Island. And now they have just perfected this formula where they're able to get every license in the world and churn out these episodic games. and they've kind of TV-fied video games to a certain extent. And they've just been an equal opportunity adapter of every franchise. I mean, they've done a CSI game and they've done a Law & Order game. Yeah, which it should be, feels like that should not be allowed for some reason. I know.

Right. And they've done a DC game, Batman, and they're doing a Marvel game, which looks like it's going to be Guardians of the Galaxy. So they are just kind of working with both sides of the aisle. They release on every platform they possibly can. And so they're just everywhere. And they've managed to establish this reputation where anyone will trust them with their characters. They really are the best at what they do.

I think if you think of the narratively driven game space, I mean, it's pure narrative almost. Like the mechanics of the games are extremely primitive, almost to the point of like, why are they even, why do they exist? But in terms of choice-driven narrative games, choose your own adventure type games, they're the best. They're the best. I mean, the way they calibrate the choices that you have to make throughout their games, that's the engine that drives them. Yeah, and they've probably done as much as any developer to erase video games bad rap as a poor storytelling medium. They've managed to not screw up horribly, which is why they keep getting companies to trust them with these very lucrative franchises. And it's pretty impressive that they can get CSI and Law & Order and DC and Marvel.

Maybe we need Telltale to make the American government into a game and somehow both parties will want to work with them. Everyone wants to work with Telltale because they now have this track record of not tarnishing your license. Yeah. I mean, the Game of Thrones one, I went into, you know, with a little bit of trepidation because that's like, you know, that's a hard license to play. And if you're not George R. Martin, the fans are obviously so fickle, but it was really great. I mean, it's pretty hard license for George R. Martin. Yeah, I know, right. you know, you're asked to kind of navigate the trade winds of power from the perspective

of a kind of medium-sized northern house, and you've got the Lannisters pulling you one direction, you've got the Bolton's pulling you in a direction, you've got your sense of duty to your house, and there was really very few gaming experiences that I had in 2014, 2015, that were as enjoyable as verbally sparring with Circe Lannister. Yeah, right. And that's kind of the genius of what they've done is historically licensed games have often been tie-in games. So you play the movie and then you play the game of the movie and it's always rushed and it's always a cash-in and Telltale crafts these original stories inside the same universe. So with Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, it's kind of peripheral characters. They're cameos from characters you'd recognize from the TV show or the comics, but they aren't really playing a starring role.

It's sort of original stories, and that gives them the freedom to play around a bit and work in the well-known faces, but not have to be bound by the established storylines. And I think that's sort of the main thing that sets Batman apart for me so far is not so much the mechanics. I mean, the engine has gotten an overhaul, and it badly needed one. I played the previous telltale games on consoles, and it was just so glitchy. Yeah. You know, and it sort of showed what their priorities are, the storytelling and the narrative. Right. And not so much the gameplay, although even the storytelling and the narrative was affected at times by just audio cutting out or not syncing up with the cutscenes.

And I guess that's just a product of how much content they are trying to churn out now. But they've given it an overhaul. So it looks better. It looks very comic booky. It's higher resolution. When Bruce Wayne strips down, you can really see the bat bulge in very very. High fidelity. Which is what we've been waiting for.

Yeah, really. To be fair, for so long. And, you know, the basic beats are the same. And that's the knock against telltale is that what seemed original and revolutionary, the first time you played a telltale game now just seems like a telltale game. And the jokes we were making in the intro about remembering certain decisions and the messages that flash on the screen, I mean, it's kind of, the first time you played a tell-tale game, it was, wow, the choices I make really affect the story. And then every time after that, it's, well, they don't actually affect the story as much as you're led to believe.

And it's kind of the antithesis of show don't tell as a storytelling technique when every time there's a pivotal moment, the game basically just announced that that was an important moment. So that kind of gets told after a while. I agree with that totally. My perspective is that game developing, so much of it is about hiding things from the player. You know, it's like menu screens exist to, you know, mask load screens and certain animations. You know, like when I'm thinking of Tomb Raider, these really cool, like, animations where Lara Croft, like, kind of tries to pass through this small crack in a wall is really just to cover the fact that your console needs to, like, load the graphics and load all this stuff. Right.

And that's essentially what Telltale does as well. I mean, they have a narrative-driven game that has the kind of bare illusion of choice. And they've just become almost scientific about creating these choices that kind of give you like the least satisfying outcome either way. It's like the best of bad choices. But they're, but really compelling it in that way. But I agree with you. You know, I agree with you that it's like, it's very bare-bones stuff. but at the same time, like, they do it so well.

It's like, in terms of story-driven games, I don't think there's anybody that does it better. It's all story. Yeah, and I guess that's the sacrifice you have to make to be able to develop this many games at once and work with this many licenses. You have to have this framework that's almost interchangeable, and you can just plug in each license's unique aspects on this same basic backbone. And obviously, you still have to tell a compelling story. and for the most part they still do that, and that's the most important part. And what sets Batman apart for me, I think, is that it's not those peripheral characters or original characters. It is the main characters of Batman, some of the most famous adversaries you're used to, and Batman himself and Alfred and Two-Face and the Joker, and they all pop up.

But I think it really tinkers with the established backstories in a way that I don't think the other telltale games have. I mean, you do play the Batman origin story and the shooting in the alley for the 20 millionth time in the past decade alone. But it's a little different this time. You find out some things about the Wains that I don't think are part of the established story. You know more about comics than I do. But from what I was able to glean in my Wikipedia deep dives, I mean, there's sort of a side to Vicky Vale that is not in previous depictions of Vicky Vale. also it really does seem to mess with the story I know, at least in a way that previous Telltale games haven't.

And I suppose that's a product of it being a comic book property and comic book backstories being very malleable as it is. And DC's universe is being rebooted now for what, like the second or third time in the past several years. At least, yeah. Yeah. So this happens regularly anyway. But that has made it more interesting to me because it's actually fine.

finding out new things about characters or contradicting things about characters. And the gameplay is largely the same, but there are at least some efforts to do something new. There is a new option called crowdplay, which is sort of a local multiplayer that lets the people around you vote on the decisions you make in the game. I haven't tried that because I'm so alone. But there are a few other tweaks here and there. Because it's Batman, there are crime scenes where you piece together clues and you link them together and then you kind of come up with a unified theory of the crime and there are parts where

you can fly a drone sort of and plan out, you know, taking down enemies, that kind of thing. So they're making efforts. So it's not like click here to kick zombie in the head. It's a little more advanced than that. I mean, it's still largely quick time events, but there's at least a planning aspect to it that hasn't been present before. And there was one planning stage where there was. were a bunch of bad guys. And the text said,

Forearmed Guard, stealth, not an option. And I was so happy to hear that stealth wasn't an option, which won't be a surprise to anyone who listened to our last episode. Can you give us a synopsis? Like a spoiler-free synopsis? It's basically Harvey is running for mayor of Gotham. And so it's partly the politics of supporting him or not supporting him. And then people are out to get Batman. And there's this group called the Children of Arkham that has mysterious origins. and is trying to, you know, terrorize the city and the usual kind of Batman thing. Yeah.

And, you know, meanwhile, people are trying to take over Wayne Enterprises and force Bruce out. So it's kind of like a spiral for Batman, at least where I am through the first four episodes. Things are just not going his way at all. It's tough being Batman. It is. By the way, one of my favorite things to do is to have comics people explain, like, the plot of it, like the arc of a plot. And just because it's the most insane sounding thing, like, ever. I love explaining plots, comic plots, people.

Well, it's like, see, there's infinite universes and they're collapsing. And then these people. Yeah, that's great. That's why all the Wikipedia pages are like 13,000 pages long. So, yeah. And I mean, there's still some strange aspects to it. Like Harvey Dent is built like a bodybuilder for some reason. I don't know why, but okay.

And, you know, there's still some glitchiness. But because I was playing on PC, I don't know. whether to blame my PC or the game. In the past, I could just blame the game. But now I don't know. It could be my computer. But that was still an issue. It's still telltale.

And the latest telltale releases, it seems, have just sort of settled in in this kind of comfortably above average territory where they get, you know, like a 75-ish average review score because everyone is just like, yeah, that was same old good telltale. It didn't really surprise us. I guess to ascend the metacritic totals, they'd need to shake things up and do something different than they have. The tyranny of the metacritic totals. Yeah, right. And I'd like to see them do like a fully branching game where the choices were not just cosmetic and it wasn't just, it seems to have some import, but then you play it again.

And even if you make a different choice, you mostly get sort of shuttled into the same big plot. points and obviously it would be a ton of work to actually build out a different ending and a different sequence depending on- Why can't they just make mass effect? Yeah, if you could somehow like no man sky-fi it so that you could just have a procedurally generated storyline that was actually good. But yeah, I mean, that's just something you can't do when you're juggling several licenses at the same time. But that would be fun because there is a little bit of disillusionment that sets in, I think, after your first time. telltale experience when you realize that it's not quite as dependent on your choices as

you think it is. All right. So that's enough telltale talk. We will now move on to some ex-tel-tale talk and bring on Sean Vanaman. A great talker, by the way. Excellent talker. You never guessed from a guy who creates dialogue-driven games that he'd be such a great talker.

So we are joined now by Sean Vanaman, who is one of the founders of the indie developer, Campa Santo, and the writer of Firewatch. Sean, thanks for coming on. Oh, thank you for having me. This is awesome. I want to thank you, first of all, for free roam mode, which is a new addition to Firewatch. You are so welcome.

I spent literally minutes tweeting about it. That's pretty much my contribution to free roam mode. While I was playing the game, not to insult the narrative and the story, your contribution to it. But I wanted the story to sort of, just so I could spend more time in that world. And I guess I'm curious about what role you played in the building of that world,

because obviously a lot of it comes down to the art design and the engine and the mechanics. But what did you do to kind of build this time and place and this sense of space that made it such a engrossing experience? Yeah, it's a game where like all of this stuff has to work together really in concert, or it kind of falls apart really fast. So our method of building the world, aside from just like the initial direction, like I guess I had the idea for Firewatch, like Jake Rodkin, who started the company with me as my roommate. And I always talked about wanting to make a game set in Wyoming because I grew up there. And I believe in like creative direction via just hiring.

It's like what type of offense do you run based on like your core five of your basketball team? You know, it's sort of just like, well, Ollie wants to make a game. Jane wants to make a game with us. We feel like we can build this nucleus around people who share a lot of the same values as us. And what do we expect out of a world where those two people especially come together to make a first person open world-ish thing. But in terms of the actual process, a lot of it was just drawing out a map of something we thought would feel good and congruous with what the player we were asking them to do.

and then learning from our mistakes as we would build those things and then try to attach them to the other areas of the world that we built as opposed to like we learned really quickly that like thinking about the tower as a hub and missions as spokes was really bad because you had to walk back so we had to do these sort of like this like looping sort of swirling map where you would curl around other objectives and sort of catch you know the tower like the henry's lookout tower on a hill on your way back. back and be like, oh, wait, I'm kind of like near where I'm, I'm near home, but I haven't been here to this place yet, because I couldn't access it from the other angle or something. And then a lot of that was like, the way those things were laid out was so much about what we were trying to accomplish in the story right then. So it's like, oh, wouldn't it be, like, oh, where's Henry going to find thing X? It's like, wouldn't it be just sort of really disturbing if it was near his tower the entire time? It's like, oh, yeah, of course. Okay. So that informed the way the world was laid out in the way we sort of started to build the space.

And then like on the flip side, we got to a point in development where we knew how much time it took to like make the game and how much time it took to make, you know, like one little quadrant of the map. And it became about, okay, Jane, build a place that feels like this. Ollie like light and draw a place that feels like this. And then we're going to think about things we can put there that that are, you know, tonally appropriate and stuff like that. So, I mean, we're a small team. So we're all just sort of like constantly bouncing off each other and like passing direction back and forth But it resulted in Firewatch which is really strange to me It's like okay like oh man all right fine good that was the output totally acceptable yes fine yeah but the entire time we were always sort of tiptoeing up to a like hidden edge of failure of like this is really not the way to be building a game like this is not the way to be building an out

through our space. Yeah, but we didn't fall off. So that was good and positive. One of the things that really just amaze me about Firewatches, it was such a strong, narratively driven game. The immersion was like incredible. There was like a level of emotional immersion that I think I've not, I've not experienced in many games. You know, like there's that conversation where you're Henry's in his tower, you're watching like the kind of the forest burn talking with Delilah. And you start like you start experiencing these like kind of like feelings of how much do I really want to expose of this character's personality to this other character and neither of

these characters exist. You know what I mean? Like really interesting experience. And it seems to me like you've really kind of like cracked some kind of code mechanic. You know, like you've come from the telltale genre. And there's, you know, when when the player interacts with the character, it's always felt a little not quite satisfying to me. Whereas in Firewatch, everything you do, everything you do, everything you look.

look at everything you can have the character do drives the story forward. How do you build a game? How do you do that like from the nuts and bolts? Like what is your strategy and trying to build a game that's that immersive? Yeah, I mean, sort of kind of what you're getting at was a feeling that I always had making like third person adventure games where I knew when I went home and like played games that I felt like emotionally stirred by. It was usually when I was in first person and having that, like, level of connection to what was happening in the world. You know, so much of the things we would talk about when we started Firewatch was, like, man, like, I love Bioshok and I always just wanted to be able to talk back to Atlas. Like, I just wanted to, like, have my character open his stupid mouth and say, like, yeah, bro, let's go save your family.

Or, hey, dude, you fucked me. I wanted that so badly And I wanted that in the Valve games and things like that And at that time of starting Firewatch It's almost like because nobody had Nobody really does that with first person characters that often It was like there was like some design rule That someone somewhere learned a long time ago

So you just don't do it You know it's like oh if someone if that was the thing that should be done Then people would be doing it Because we couldn't really point to a game that had the level of voice acting and writing that we thought we could bring to the game that also had a voice protagonist in first person that had sort of pre-proved that that would work. And then there is like little things that there are like nuts and bolts sort of like meat and potato rules to writing a good game protagonist with especially if you're going to have dialogue choices in the game that I've sort of picked up regardless of the. the perspective of the game. And that's just making sure the players like always throwing the main levers of where this conversation turns. You know, like if you and I are in, we're having this conversation three of us right now. And Ben, if you're the player, it would be important to know,

like, if the conversation was going to get really dark, like, where you get to throw the lever to either create that moment to happen or react to it in a way that's appropriate. So you're always sort of thinking about is the player, am I letting the player create the tone of the conversation, or am I letting them react to something that was out of their control? And if you're not like really aware of where you're doing that, you just make something that's at the, I guess at best kind of boring and at worst, like really off-putting. And I mean, so much of, so much I think of what people will get to, like what people respond to in Firewatch is that like Rich and Sissy who voiced the characters, Rich Summer and Sissy Jones,

just are incredible. Um, And they have an ease of communication and of acting that suspends your disbelief so quickly that allows you to start participating in the fantasy in a way that I think people react well to. At least it would work for me. Like when I would, you know, I write the game and then the words kind of go into a database and stuff. And I'll remember like the one or two goofs that I think are good. It's like, oh man, I can't wait till they say that line that it was so, fucking smart that I wrote, you know, but in terms of like the wave of the conversation and like

what happens between two people when they talk to each other, I kind of forget almost. And then I remember I would hear it in the studio and be like, because we recorded them at the same time, which I think was really smart. It was a smart choice for us to make in terms of them playing off each other and finding their relationship and like mostly in the tone of how they communicated. And then I'd see it in the game and I would respond well to it. And a lot of it, I don't know, also interconnected when it talks like how do you accomplish it because it's sort of like you i guess the best way to talk to describe the process is you're walking through and you don't do this in a lot of more capital g games like that are either more systems driven or more simulation driven but you know

the purpose of something like firewatch is to really suspend your disbelief and for the game to be very, very subtly, but very confidently in control of the tone throughout and make you buy into it as an artificial thing. And then you just stop forgetting that it's, you know, the way a good movie does that, you know, it's like just classic suspension of disbelief. So I think a lot of what we do is just sort of move through the game, being really, really, like literally playing the game, really in tune with what I'm feeling while I'm playing. I'm playing it, you know, I mean, to a really, like, disgusting level of, like, hypervigilance

that is annoying to most people where it's like, ah, God, it's like they're still, they're kind of just still talking. Like, there was no turn in this conversation. Like, I feel like she's not leaving me alone. Like, oh, or like, on kind of bored here or like, God, I haven't heard from her in a while, but not for like any particular reason. And then making sure that we've built really, like, good, like, constructive tools to address those types of problems where, you know, we built a system where I would just look at the world map from the top down and create a, like, a volume, just a, like a cube that you would, like an invisible cube that you'd walk into. And inside of those, they would all have some sort of impact on the conversation, which is like, okay, they can talk about these type of things in these types of places. They definitely can't talk about anything in these certain types of places. And then I would sort of, like, grow them and shrink them and drag them around until I felt confident. that like a certain chapter of the game was tonally correct or like in line of what we were at least trying to accomplish.

I don't know if that answers your question at all, but the short answer is it's so hard. It sucks. It fucking sucks so hard. It's really just just a living nightmare of your standing on a rug the size of a football field and you step on one bump and then creates another one. But it's like at the 10-yard line and you're. not very close to where that happened, you know. And the moment you feel like the rug is smooth, you're like, ship it, just ship it, just ship

it right now. Get it out. Like, press the button, put it on Steam, put it on Steam. Yeah. We'll add the free roam mode later. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, again, like 10 people made Firewatch. So we always knew we wanted a free roam mode.

We knew we wanted to do like a really robust making of mode. So we put out the Firewatch audio tour about a month and a half ago or two months ago. Yeah. And like, we just, it's lucky that we live in a time. time where we don't have to press it to disc if, you know, because we didn't go that way. It's the games of age of all digital. So we can give ourselves a little bit of a break on that, you know, it's like, you can just say, no, we'll ship free roam and it'll be great because people will like come back to the game in their Steam library or they're on PSN, you know,

and then maybe they'll want to, like, replay it at that moment. Because with a game like ours, it's kind of, it's, it's like, if you've ever been to, like, a restaurant where they like do, they bring you little small courses, but they bring you like 11 and at like course 8 you're like just stop this would have been fine just stop i'm like every bite of food i have from this point forward is making the previous bites i had worse and it's all just going to be poop so please stop yeah it's kind of like that i think in that you you don't want to like just like drop a giant bomb of when stuff is like when our stuff is like so tonally intricate to drop just a whole bunch of stuff on someone all at once so i'm kind of

thankful that we live in a time where we don't have to do that. So aside from wanting to establish your own unique style, what made you want to move away from the Walking Dead model of sort of telegraphing to the player? This is an important moment, you know, having some text on the screen that says so and so will remember that. Right. Or, you know, and having kind of the stats at the end of a section of the game that says, you know, this percentage of players made that choice.

Because, you know, when that happened, when you worked on that, that was kind of a step forward. And everyone was very impressed by that. And it worked really well at the time. And the evolution of game storytelling has kind of maybe moved past that a little bit. Now it's evolving very quickly. So what made you want to ditch that aspect of things? I mean, I think that that, like, so like if you look at the design of Walking Dead season one where that stuff came into vogue for Telltale, like so much of the theme and mechanic. of that made sense.

It was just like so correct in so many different ways. And like the folks at Telta who were like really pushing for all those systems and built those systems, which was totally not me, we're like totally like I saw something there that I think was really smart for The Walking Dead, which is the Walking Dead is about these like crystallized left or right fork in the road. Do you kill the guy or bring him with you? Do you, you know, do you save person A or save person B? moments and it's been that way in the comic books and it's definitely that way in the show

and those like will they or won't they or did he or didn't he and like willie or won't he or whatever questions are the things that like continue to like churn the like the stoke the flames of the fans that are super into the walking dead and you know when you would talk about a walking dead episode the next day at work or on a podcast um you would go like oh can you I can't believe they killed character X, you know, like, oh, I totally thought it was going to, it should have been Y, because if they killed that character, then whatever, whatever. So, like, exposing those stats at the end of a episode of the game, like, was just part of that conversation.

You could start having that conversation in your head with, like, every other person who had played the game, like, oh, why did they feed Larry? Like, Larry's the worst. And then it would draw you into the community and, like, okay, I'm going to go online and, like, start talking to people about this because I see that other people are playing. the game. It was just really, really smart. Whereas, like, when I think about choice in a video game, the thing that really interests me sort of theme, like, more from on a more, like, theme agnostic level, because I would, I would argue, like, that type of design,

by the way, doesn't quite work with every genre or every type of story. When you're just an, when you're just a hero, Lee Everett's just a guy. He would play him as a hero, but, like, he's, he has the emotional possibility space to be lots of different things. When you're heroed, are those choices like as interesting, you know? You can argue yes or no, whatever. But the thing that always interested me about choice in a video game is the sort of like the micro moments that allow you to influence what's coming out of the screen and feel like you're there.

You know, like I've never, even though I worked on games and had a lot of like fun making games where, yeah, are you going to save Doug or Carly? Are you going to kick this girl out of your group or bring her with you? While I had a good time designing those things, the things that I like, where my heart is, is giving players the verbs to feel like they are really in a story.

Like, that's the stuff that I find most interesting. Like, I don't know if we're always going to do dialogue choices in our game. Like, there could be a time where the story and the mechanic of the game just, it's more interesting for the story to react to your actions as opposed to or the characters of the world to react to your actions as opposed to like

the one of you know three choices you made you know i just think like the way we think about it is way less like we have a house style now and more just we have a core set of values for the type of games we want to make which are games that like transport you to a space that make you feel like another person and then hopefully while you're feeling like another person are capable of like ginning up, like, empathy and, like, internal player conflict that you didn't quite know was there. You know, like, people have a very strong reaction to the end of Firewatch, and so many players will finish the game, have a really strong reaction, and then send me a tweet or, like, a DM or something, like, six days later and be like, I was thinking, you know, and, like, that's amazing.

Like, that's, that's, like, that's, like, all right, good. Like, that's success. And then, you know, outside of any, like, sales figures or whatever, like, then the game was a success. So, and also, like, you know, like, when you start your own company, like, you have, all you really have is your values and, like, the thing that you're trying, the thing that you're chasing and trying to produce. Like, the idea that there's, like, a secret sauce or, like, a problem to be cracked in entertainment software is, like, ridiculous, you know? because it's it's just so elusive what people will like and play and respond to

and then tell their friends to play. You know, it's just, you know, I mean, when World Warcraft came out, we were all like certain that in the year 2016, we would just only be playing like elaborate MMOs. You know? Like my sister.

My sister plays a lot of games and she sent me a text yesterday. She was like, what MMO is good? And I was like, I think still wow? I'm like, I don't know. Like, Guild Wars is good? I don't know.

What a strange question to be asked right now. Yeah, it was just such a, you know. So you mentioned how, you know, Walking Dead has these very dramatic moments and maybe Firewatch didn't to the same extent. But throughout the game, there is a sense that it could. And of course, there's this incredible tension that is building up throughout the whole playthrough. And I don't want to give away. any specifics because if anyone's listening who hasn't played yet, I don't want to spoil that experience for them. But there are ways the game could go that you think it might go, that there

might be more supernatural elements to it, that there will be sort of a mystery box element to the game. And ultimately, it doesn't really go in that direction. And I don't think it needed to go in that direction. I think we loved it as it was. But I also probably would have loved it if it gone the other way. So how tempted were you? How close did you come to kind of going down that path instead? Um, that's, uh, you know, I mean, we were first starting off, like, everything was on the table. It was like, you're being hunted by a bear also. You know, like, and I was like, because somebody pitched that and I remember we were in my house and, uh, I was like, that's so scary. Like that like got into like, sort of a weird like animal.

brain part of me where I was like something happened when I was a kid that made me afraid of bears for sure because I went like oh man that's the scariest thing I could even ever imagine um but uh I think once so the opening of the game which I won't give away but was like the first thing other than like the setting and some of the core design tenants of like it's going to be first person and you're going to walk around and um have a conversation with another person again just like I want to be talk back to Atlas, simple as that. Or like, why can't you tell Gladys to eat shit? From Portal.

Yeah, sorry, I just like, so who's Gladys? We're in a safe space here. We're in a safe reference space here. Yeah. I can't remember what the, oh, no, no, no, no, never mind. I was like, what are the ringer rules on swearing? And then I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, I listen to that 1600 podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think one of the first things in terms of like shipable sort of. sort of like real stake in the ground content we made was the opening which I made in a product called Twine which is just like a publicly available

choosing an adventure engine that I used to use. It's the simplest thing like you can literally sit in front of a computer with your like five year old like niece and make a cool video game together. It's really cool. But I made that and then when that existed it was like pretty obvious

that the story was going to be driven by the psychosis of these characters, and then things started to kind of fall into place. That didn't, like, preclude the idea of a villain or an antagonistic force or the supernatural or whatever, but when we realized that the real motivating force to the game was going to be Henry and Delilah and didn't have to be, didn't have to be something spooky out in the woods. It meant that we could put spooky stuff out of the woods out in the woods and the players would have all this space to wonder what it was and that felt more right to us. Yeah, I mean, and also like we were just like a small indie team

making a game and the idea of not making a genre piece was really interesting to me. And I went like, well, if this doesn't work out, we'll just go. I'm going to have to go back to making genre content because that's what most video games are. So I'm going to have to like go take a job making a game where it is a Cloverfield, you know, or whatever. Like so like maybe I can think about it not being that right now and see what happens, you know. But that's not to say that there's not something spooky in the game listeners who haven't played Firewatch. It seems to me that there's like a natural tension between the interactivity of, you know, video games and the necessary linearness of a narrative.

How do you, and Firewatch, the great things about it is how skillfully you guys hide that kind of guiding hand. Could you talk about some of the techniques, the things that you use to kind of hide the fact that you kind of guide a player into a direction in order to tell this story? Yeah, I mean, you're pointing to like a core conflict with like the type of games that I have been able to make, especially like, I'm trying to think, probably like, five or six years ago, there was this a lot of conversation around the idea, at least in the industry, like, for, like, at the professional, like, conference level and stuff, like, people talking about how core

narrative games were, like, not just not viable, but were in conflict with the dynamic systems driven nature of what a video game, not just is but should be, that trying to tell a real story in a game was folly and that the emergent stories you would have in something like, I guess if you're playing today, like, I don't know if you guys have played Rimworld. It's like a dwarf fortress with pretty graphics or, well, because Dorf Fortress has no graphics, but like, or like something like, you know, the player stories of something like Sim City or whatever where like, oh, yeah, there was a flood, and then this happened, and then all this happened, you know. And everyone's story is kind of different.

Like, there was, like, a real, like, staunch, like, perspective in my industry that that was the good video game. And that was right before I made The Walking Dead. So the way I kind of think about story now, or at least I did in Firewatch, and I'm in, like, we're starting a new thing now. So I'm just challenging all my assumptions about how we tell a story and, like, building a lot of prototypes that push. the decisions we made in Firewatch all the way to like the margins and then go what's in this what's in this empty space here but the way I think about story now is like you can still do all that while telling like we the way we thought about Firewatch was the way you think about like Disneyland or a really good real world game which is we give players somewhere to go don't tell them how to get there and then when

they get there, challenge their expectations about what they're going to find, and then let them react to it. Because when you play Firewatch, there's like random things that happen. There's, I don't know how you're going to get down to like, I don't know what your, like, your mental journey is like trying to find, like the teen camp on day two. You know, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know if you get super lost. And then finally, like, catch something out of the corner of your eye that, like, points you south. And you're like, oh, now I'm on the hunt and then as you're doing that you happen to stumble into a Delilah conversation where she's asking you about like your life before you got out here or did you just know exactly where to go

because you opened a walk through and then Delilah never called you and you didn't have the discovery moment but you like this got turned around once and got attacked by a weird raccoon you know like I don't know so um I think that is sort of a really interesting way to tell a linear story because I mean if everyone's like if at the end of the game you could hit a button and then just like print out your like screenplay of your play through like peoples would be different things would be in different orders and be by virtue of being in different order like they feel different different you know like that's just like whatever film class 101 Eisenstein stuff and I find that to be at least in making Firewatch I found that to be really satisfying and a way to sort of address

this hard line between the needs of a story to be linear and the desire of a video game with systems to be a little more chaotic or dynamic at least. I get more and more sort of interested in that stuff and we barely started to dabble in it in Firewatch.

Like there's a lot like the end line and like the you arrive at the tower talking to Delilah for the first time. The whole like last like whatever the last 30 seconds of that conversation is a random role. between a bunch of different things that Delilah can say to you

about why you've decided to take this job and then it cuts since it's like day one and Henry is at his desk like typing on a typewriter and like the day before the game came out or around when the game came out we were over at Pixar

which isn't like they're across the bay from us showing them the game Humblebrake and they're like the Humbley. You know Pixar we walked past their like mountain of Oscars we were recognized by

Pete Doctor came up to me and I signed a couple autographs for his kids I think it was like actually someone was dating someone from Pixar I think that's why we went over there it was somebody was like my boyfriend works here can we show him Firewatch

in their lunchroom but they're like so linear like they're obviously like the masters of linear story to the point where they obsess over individual frames of the movie you know and like we were playing the game with a small group and Delilah had ended that conversation with like maybe you took this job

to write your novel. That's the sort of like BS reason like a white guy goes out in the woods. And then it's like day one and Henry's typing. And like that's what happened. And everyone laughed. They're like, oh, that's such a good psych gag. And I was like, uh, yeah, I'm a genius. I didn't know.

Like it's like, you know, I did like we stopped right there and I was like, I have to be honest. Like there's like a one, there's like a 20% chance that that happens. And they were like, what? Why would you prevent that from happening for those. of that other 80%. And I'm like, well, because the other 80% stuff that happens is pretty good.

And there's nothing more exciting than talking to your friend about that funny goof. And they're like, I didn't get that. And now you start to wonder as a player, like, what did I get? Like, what am I, like, how, what's the possibility space of, of this experience? That's, like, for a small team, really potent.

Like, if we can fill the empty space of, like, with a bunch of, like, stuff in your mind, like, what am I missing? Or, like, how much of this is, like, How much of the story did I see? Then the thing that you bought and spent all this time playing just feels like bigger and more alive. And that's way better than the like authorial satisfaction of everyone hearing my one good joke or whatever. Like that sucks.

It also puts a lot more pressure on you to like be good at writing. Like if I know that there's like a chance that nobody's going to read this or hear this trash, I'm like, okay, fine, good. I'll just put it in the game. I think one of the things that Jason and I both appreciate, appreciated was the length, say it's around four hours-ish, and you get the same sort of satisfaction from those four hours that you might get, at least narratively speaking, from some other games that will take up much more of your life. And I think I played it in one sitting, certainly in one day. And you've been doing these episodic games and games that are a little shorter, at least

piece by piece. Are you more attracted to that kind of length? I think it just kind of fits in my life better now and it fits in Jason's life better now, I think, if it can be confined to that kind of period. But are you attracted to telling a much longer, more involved story, or is this you think, the most interesting medium? Yeah, I mean, I like it, but I, you know, I would be lying if I didn't think every once in a while. And then I instantly like, like, squelch this. But, oh, what would it be like to take our values and make? something at a scale of like a red dead redemption you know like what would that be like it's like well that'd be like seven years first off um and uh no i mean for the type of stories that i've

we've wanted to tell at least between walking dead in this game and the next game it's kind of important that you get to the end you know i think for the whole thing to really set up like a flawn or something. You know, like it's like a, it just kind of comes out like a little like soupy if that doesn't happen. So I like making games that people can finish. You know, we were super satisfied by continuing to update this game. And like that's really exciting to me. The idea that on day one, thousands of people can have this shared experience of finishing the core game. And then over the course of a year, we can continue to like deliver stuff to those people that allows them to re contextualize the story or like re-experience the things they liked about it or um i don't even know yet

you know like those are the things that i find to be really interesting so i see a staying in this zone of like completable in one or two sittings games but i you know i don't necessarily like i don't think firewatch is like a model for like what a video game should be i think it just made sense for the team we had and the type of story we were trying to tell but what if we had updated the game with like a two-hour side story that you know that you didn't or like what happened before you play someone from 30 years after this story or 30 years before like that would be really really really cool and interesting and interesting to me I don't know like I don't really finish games that are over 10 hours long generally um I can't remember the last time I did I got real close to finishing Uncharted 4 I'm sorry

oh you should finish it that's so close I got so close I'm just like right like literally like I stopped watching the TV show Lost four episodes before the series finale. Well, you know, that's, that was a good idea. Yeah, it's like not to compare the quality of Lost Uncharted Four at all, because they're very, very different. And one is probably worth finishing. But, yeah, I just kind of went like, okay, you know, and I think there's a part of me. It's like, I got to finish that. But I already know that, like, I've experienced some of the highest highs I could experience in a game with what I've experienced already. Whereas, like, I don't know, I finished, I guess I finished

Last of Us. That was like no question I was going to finish that game. And I'm so glad I did, especially with the way that game ends. Yeah, I mean, it would be a bummer to me. Actually, Last of Us is a good example. Sorry, it's a long answer. But like, it would be a real bummer to me to like, I think the ending of Last of Us is perfect. Like, I put the controller down. It was just like, fuck! Like, so mad. I was just like, go. I'm so glad I'm a game going out out this year. I was just like, in a rage. It was so good. It would be a real bummer to me. to somehow make something that good, that we would make something that good,

then check the Steam achievements and only like 11% of the people who bought the game like I would just be it. Like I would just slow walk into like into the ocean. You know, like I'd be like, no, sorry. Yeah, so that's not necessarily good business, but as a creator, that's important to me. Two things that I think Firewatch

probably executed better than maybe any game I've ever played is this is a tall orderly show cool it down Jason of a game is the tutorial and the credits I don't know if you could call the intro to Firewatch the tutorial necessarily but it kind

of is there's a lot of exposition heavy lifting that goes on there and then the credits which are just kind of like a thematically perfect like how did you how did you come up with those things how did you build those in such a way that they just really feel like

they naturally flow into the rest of the story. Yeah, I think that's sort of like a company's values thing, you know. I mean, with like the people who work here, Jake Rodkin especially, really think about from the moment you're on the dashboard, and you click that Firewatch icon, like we're in charge of everything that comes out of the screen. And it all has to like be good and fit together seamlessly. Like even just like, like I literally, we talk about what has to. when you click on the Firewatch icon and it goes from being an icon and translates to a full

screen image, which is just like a bright yellow background in the black Firewatch logo. Like we talked about that. We're like, what's that? You know, like, so we care a lot about it. And that's like a values thing. But in terms of the beginning and the end, the beginning we knew out of the gate, we knew that you were going to make choices about Henry's life that were going to weave in and out of going out into the woods

and it was going to it was going to jump between perspectives between the second person text and first person silent movement and we're like okay well it makes good sense that we can just we can have you walk and interact with and eventually get the radio

and then once you've done that we basically just have to tell you oh p.S you have a map and a compass later so we knew that that could be like classic video game tutorial territory because it's the beginning. But the opening of why it was like about Henry's life was created because when we started making the game, nobody in the team knew who Henry was. And I have had like an extensive career of like not being a programmer getting better,

but like where you would write this documents and then people just don't read them, which is like totally cool because reading documents when you have other stuff to do sucks. So I just made an interactive like choosing an adventure game that was like, here's who Henry is. And then everyone played it. And I was like, oh, my God. And I'm like, yeah, cool, right? Like, okay, so like, and then the next question was, well, then where do we start the game?

And how do we make sure that players have this knowledge that I now have as a creator so they can start making choices with how they talk to Delilah? So we don't like, gotcha, like, you're married, you know, after you've been talking to her for an hour. Now we had a problem to solve, which is how do we deliver that information to the player? And we're like, oh, we've already made something that does that. Can we just make that good and put it in the game? Yes. Okay, cool.

And then it was really exciting. We're like, oh, man, what a weird way to open a game. Don't tell anybody we're doing that. Don't show press. Never, you never put that in a build that goes outside of this building because that'll be a cool surprise. And then with the end, gosh, that was just a dis, like the ending of the game, which I'll obviously talk in way less detail about, was just discovered along the way.

We just, we had a camera mechanic. The camera plays a role in the end, I guess. And as we started to, like, justify why these things were in the game to ourselves, Those two things found each other, I guess, is the way to describe it. But we weren't pressuring ourselves too hard to make that click. We just knew that we had to do it before we shipped. And then there's some music that comes in. And a lot of the games music, well, it's written by Chris Remo most of it.

But then we have a license track in the game. And a lot of that comes off of just like a playlist that I'm keeping throughout development. And it's like, do we think we could get this for this much money? Like, let's try. and then it turned out we could. And yeah, it all just kind of... Again, it's like just being in touch with what's right for the game the whole time,

the same way I was kind of talking about walking around the world and being like, is this right? Is this good? Does this feel right? And not having to have like... This is like such the bugaboo of so many, like, game designers in the industry is like having to have the perfect logical reason

while something is good. It's like, no, man, like this doesn't feel good. Like that's just doesn't... You know, so like when it feels right, you know, and then you just like don't touch it anymore. And it was... important for us that everything felt connected and felt personal to you. And that's really hard in a video game because so much if it's pre-authored, but we feel like we were success, like,

again, that was like a values thing. Like the beginning is, the beginning and the end are both, like, completely personal to you guys. Like, I don't know what your experience of those things was like. I know, like, in the general sense of what I was hoping for, but you did things throughout the game that shaped your experience there. So I don't know, which is cool. So, last question, you're working on a film adaptation of Firewatch, and I think Jason and I might do an episode later this year all about movie adaptations of video games, but I wonder... Oh, man, I'm going to listen to that podcast. I don't think we'll give you any answers about how to do it or anything.

No, that's fine. I hope it just starts with like, yeah, Resident Evil and the two-liter. Yeah, right. It'll be lots of Ui-Bo movies, but I wonder, you know, because obviously it's good for the developer to make money. And that's good for gamers if the developers who make games that they like get to make money and keep making games. That's good. They trickle down economics of video games.

Yeah, right. It's good for non-gamers who would never experience Firewatch in any way, if not for the film version of it. But should a gamer who's played a game get psyched when that game gets turned into a movie? Like, even if it gets turned into a good movie, is that something that is giving them something? thing that the game version of that story didn't give them. Is there still something that a movie can do that a game can't do? Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I haven't really had the chance to talk about any of this stuff. So thanks for asking about it. Just because of the timing when it happened and this generally haven't been doing press. But yeah, so I think the answer

in this in particular instance is yes with the giant caveat that like, hey, like, okay, you and me listening at home. Nothing gets made in Hollywood. Literally nothing, nothing ever. Every single time you've been on like any blog, any listening to any podcast and you hear that like there's a bioshock finally is going to be, no, it's never happening. Like things don't get made. Period. It's just the idea is there's a press release and then nothing happens. But so with that giant caveat, we actually, our partnership with this company Good Universe run by a guy named Joe Drake, who's been around for a long time. He ran Lionsgate

through the Hunger Games era. So he's a dude who knows how to make stuff. He and the folks at good universe sort of responded to Firewatch in a way that was very, very real in terms of like what they thought got out of it emotionally.

And then we decided to, like a lot, what happens a lot of games is that they're like, you find somebody who wants to make it into a movie, they want to give you like 150 grand or whatever to like option it. And then they get to like,

they have the rights to make it. it over the next five years and if they don't make it it comes back to you so you're like sweet some money in your pocket goodbye and then you don't talk to them anymore um we didn't option fire watches we um are actually like involved the whole way and like everyone always says like oh but they're involved it's like no we're actually we took no money from anyone like if the firewatch movie gets made and it does well like we will make money but other than that like it's just something we think is creatively interesting so we partnered with these guys because we felt like they shared a a value that Jake and I had, which is, like, I like a lot of movies based on novels, and, like,

Hollywood in general has a, like, a very, like, long history of adaptation from, look at, like, the big sleep. You know, you look at a lot of movies that have even, like, won best picture over the years that they start as, like, plays and books, um, and short stories, especially. Like, I just saw Arrival. That was a short story. Um, that was adapted. Also, see Arrival. If you haven't seen arrival. Yes. I've seen a rival. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Like thing two I walked out of and just was like I walked out of that movie like I was in a car accident I was just like stumbling through the mission of San Francisco like bumping into people like I don't know I was very emotionally intense it was like four days after the election it was like just a real

Anyway um I want to make a I want the fire the ideal in my brain fire watch movie is a movie that we No one spends a ton of money making enough to make it good but it's got a great cat and a great script, and it doesn't matter that it was a video game, and that people can walk into a theater and be told a good story and walk out and have someone tell them, did you know that was a video game? And they're like, fuck off. You know, like, that's like, who cares? Like, also, I can't believe you.

You know, because, like, if everyone who bought Firewatch, which is a ton of people, like, all went and saw the movie, like, day one, we would, I guess that'd actually be pretty good. I was like, oh, wait a second. I did the math. And I went like, ah, the point is, like, it's, you know, and it's a more ubiquitous. medium. So I think we have a story that like because it's founded in the characters

translates really well. But you know, it wouldn't be a thing where like, you know, so much of like you think about what the Bioshock movie would be or like what the last of us movie would be is like, oh, there's that moment that I remember and like callbacks to the medium and stuff like that. But with Firewatch, it's like, it's more like, it's a little more literary so we could do things that as an adaptation that just made sense for for film. And that was something that's really exciting to me to just. sort of go, okay, we made, like, the story of Firewatch is the story of Firewatch the video game because all the pieces fit together, but like, we're not going to shoot the movie in first

person, you know, like, that would be a bad choice. So what story, given who these characters are and given where this, like, the facts of the setting and tone of the, like, the art direction, like, what makes sense to walk into a theater and see? And we're just kind of talking about that now, talk to a couple directors, and mostly it's just the folks at good universe. and I figuring, like answering those questions for ourselves. And that's a really fun experiment. It's really, really cool. And I think if something goes into production and ends up being made,

it'll stand alone as its own thing. It's not like some transmedia empire. It'll just be a movie that you can see. And I think that's the way it should be. So you're not taking Ui Bowles pitch on Henry with the axe in the cave. Oh, we're accepting pitches from all bankable A-plus directorial talent Yeah The bear idea is going to come back actually And that's what's going to happen And he's just going to have one kind of dull axe

That he fights it off with the entire time Well, in the time that we've been talking People could have gone and played like a quarter of Firewatch probably And they should have Yeah, and they should do that now Because we can't recommend it highly enough and it's been fun talking to you, and people can follow you at Vanaman

and follow Camposanto and whatever you do next. We're looking forward to it. Yeah. Oh, man. There's some just push play happening right now. Very good. Sorry. No, I love that.

Are you kidding me? That is the best. Are you kidding me? I was like, oh. Yeah, that's like a local L.A. band that we just found on SoundCloud or something. And we're like, will you guys do this for us? Very good.

Yeah, I was like, man, I don't want to spoil anything. I'm not going to say anything more. I love that. Oh, I thought that was like a slow fade out on that hot 80s track that you can find inside of Firewatch. Love you. The problem is when I hear that song, it's just one in the morning and I'm fixing a weird bug.

Like, that song is like Pavlovian. It's just like the pizza place down the street from our old office. All right. See you, Sean. Thank you so much, guys. It was really fun. So that is it for this episode. Spend responsibly.

Whether it's today, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, don't buy anything you'll regret later. Don't get crushed in front of a Walmart. No, don't do that. But at least you'll have something to listen to if that does happen to you. So good luck standing in line. Have safe travels. We'll be back when you are back next week.

Bye.