For the Max Payne games the model was essentially a movie screenplay, that three-act structure. Lake: Yes, from a pacing and structure perspective that was something I started thinking about already when working on Max Payne 2. GamesBeat: Alan Wake’s style was very episodic, too, like a TV show. In Quantum Break it was the live action TV show. I’ve been actively looking into other mediums, other things we can bring into the game framework, and do something new with those things. It keeps evolving and changing, which means it’s always exciting. It feels like there are very few rules when it comes to games and the elements you can put into a game. That’s been a kind of design philosophy, if you will, for me through all these years. It felt like a really good way of bringing more storytelling in there. I’m a big fan of comic books to this day. So we had to look for another method, and that led to looking into other mediums. As you pointed out, looking at very crude cutscenes at the time, what the possibilities might be there - it didn’t really lend itself to doing a complex, deeper story. That opened up the internal world of the character and brought that into the frame. Knowing that tonally, that would be very fitting, bringing that into the video game context made a lot of sense. Max Payne being kind of this hard-boiled story, one aspect of it was the narration by the character, which is a method used in hard-boiled crime fiction, novels, and obviously in film noir movies. We had to go in there and invent it through this, which was obviously both challenging and very exciting. Lake: Back then it wasn’t obvious at all to even try to tell a deeper, more complex story within the framework of an action game. You didn’t even have the ability to use cinematics in a big way with an in-game engine. GamesBeat: With Max Payne you had very severe restrictions on what you could tell. Comparing that today with so many really high quality stories being told in games, and in many different ways as well - I mean, we have more linear experiences, and more open-ended, open world experiences that take a different approach to storytelling, but the story is still a very important component in those. It was venturing into the unknown, trying to do that with Max Payne. Certainly there were games with interesting storytelling, but more of an action game, no one was doing that. It’s been a long journey, going back to Max Payne, when it felt that no one was really even attempting to do a story in a more action-oriented game. Lake: I’m very happy and also inspired by the quality of game storytelling these days. It’s good and bad, I guess, but what’s your own take on where storytelling is across the whole industry? It took me about 80 hours to finish that game, and they’re coming up with Shadow of War now, where they say it’ll be an order of magnitude bigger. Bringing up time again, I played Shadow of Mordor. GamesBeat: When you look at the state of storytelling now in the game business - I see a lot of open worlds with directed stories within those worlds. I think that a lot of interesting stuff is happening in the indie game scene, experiments with storytelling. I’m really glad to be on that ride, seeing what David Lynch and Mark Frost are coming up with. Very much at the moment enjoying the new episodes of Twin Peaks. It shows what’s possible, in a way, and that’s very stimulating and exciting. Danielewski’s House of Leaves has been one of the most important writings to me, because there’s a circular game in it. I could give a long list of writers, authors. A lot of the story’s direction comes from reading books and watching TV. Once again, almost too many to keep up with. Lake: I suppose it’s many different mediums - books, TV. GamesBeat: What are your influences as a writer? What inspires you? Thinking about that frustration, where we’re always running out of time. We have to find more time to create them, which was maybe part of what went into the themes of Quantum Break. It’s wonderful that there are so many really high quality story experiences, story games out there these days. Do you have a thought on that at the outset? You work so hard on stories these days, making them longer and more complex, and people don’t find time to finish them. A lot of gamers are in that situation, where they never get to finish the stories you guys work so hard on. GamesBeat: Just before this, you and I were bemoaning the fact that we don’t have as much time to finish games anymore.
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