When was the last time you saw a video game writer holding a trophy in a picture?
Have you ever thought, “Man, this storyline is transcendent.
The best thing I’ve experienced since Harry Potter.”
If you say, “recently” may doves descend from heaven and heap praises on your precious
golden head for the rest of your days.
If you say, “I don’t know” or “never” then we’re going to change it.
I’m Dave Connis, the newest member of the indomitable Shoddycast team and I’m introducing
a new series called, “The Story’s Behind.”
I have dubbed this series such for two reasons.
A. so that you, dear watcher, can meet and experience the men and women behind making
the story, concepts, and character arcs in the games you play not suck really badly.
B. Because it’s an incredibly witty title that I came up with by myself.
*whispers* if you don’t get it, there’s an apostrophe between the y and the s.
Think on it.
Perculate.
So no more dilly dallying Shodders, Shodding Casters, Shodcastians, we’re going to start
with one of my favorite games in the long and bespeckled history of all of humandom,
Life Is Strange.
I personally can heap unending luminescent praise on Life Is Strange.
It's a different sort of video game, that as storytelling continues to grow in games,
we’ll see the likes of more often.
LIS is a story-driven game centered around a girl named Maxine Caulfield, who moves back
to her childhood town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon to attend a seniors-only boarding school named
Blackwell Academy.
Now because this is the first episode of The Story’s Behind it might be beneficial to
say that, in a wide-generally speaking sort of general broad generalized way, there are
two forms of storytelling in games.
The first being linear-plot, you start at point A and the game’s narrative structure
pushes you towards point B. Think Bioshock Infinite or Halo.
The second sort of writing is what’s referred as the branching storyline.
This sort of narrative structure starts every player at point A but dependant on the choices
that the player makes in game can end them at either point B, C, D, 1, 2 or 5.
Life is Strange wasn’t the first game to employ the narrative structure of branching
storylines, so it’s uniqueness isn’t solely-based on that specific characteristic.
No, the biggest reason Life is Strange stood out to me was because the story was so freaking
good.
It was released episodically, five episodes in all.
The story is set in the Pacific Northwest during the fall which, holy moses made me
want to roll in a golden sun/pine needle/fall breeze bath until I died a crusty, but hella
relaxed old man.
Life Is Strange received good reviews commending the character development, and tackling of
don’t touch that with an eighty foot pole subjects
Now that we know all about the stuff, here’s the bread and butter stuff.
The writers.
Hallelujah for the writers.
The writing team behind the story of LIS consisted of Jean Luc Cano and Christian Devine.
I was able to wrangle both of them in an interview which was miraculous on multiple levels, but
mostly because Jean Luc lives in Paris, Christian lives in LA, and I live in Georgia so successfully
navigating the logistics of three separate time zones made me feel like a Time Lord.
Dr. Who aside.
Here’s what I found out about Jean-Luc.
Jean Luc started working on video games through DONTNOD Studios, a French game developer located
in Paris.
He was lucky enough to snag a spot on the team writing their first title, Remember Me.
He quickly rose through the ranks of the Remember Me army and became the cinematic director
for the game and then the motion capture director.
The game came out, thunder clapped, lightning roared everything was peaches and ponies,
except for some mixed reviews, but the studio probably had a rager of release party in which
rock bands melted faces with victory riffs and lights of various colors pulsed away to
a never ending song of celebration.
PSA, I don’t know if this happened, but let’s just believe it for the children.
At the end of Remember Me Dontnod asked Jean Luc and a co-worker to imagine a new project
using the rewind mechanic that Remember Me had used.
With that in mind, Jean Luc asked himself,
So he did. Jean Luc made himself a writer fortress impenetrable from the evil everything that could be distracting
and just started to write, letting his main influence squeeze, Stephen King, infect his
mind and creativity with amazingness.
At the end of a coffee-fueled few weeks, he ended with a hundred page document that laid
out the story of the game.
Everything from the huge story branches to the finale was on the document.
Once the document was written, he passed his word baby to Dontnod and his contract for
the project was closed.
Done.
Finished.
Eternally ended.
Caputalishous.
You probably remember that there was one other dude involved on this writing team that we
haven’t talked about.
So let’s put a bookmark in the story of the story of Life is Strange and meet Christian
Divine.
Christian is a writer/screenwriter who writes movie scripts, and video games.
He just happened to grow up with some dude named John Romero.
You may have heard of him, he’s only the creator of Doom and Quake.
His relationship with John Romero is another reason he moved out to Hollywood and after
ten years there, he met a journalist writer while at a french press conference who knew
a director at Dontnod, so when whispers of Life Is Strange started arriving on the proverbial
breeze, Dontnod contacted Christian.
No it’s possible you’re asking yourself something like, “DontNod already had a story,
why did they need another writer?”
Here’s why.
The name Jean Luc Cano?
Yeah.
That’s French.
The location of DONTNOD?
Very French.
Paris.
You know what French people speak?
French.
The 100 page document Jean Luc wrote?
It was in French.
Jean Luc hadn’t set the context of the game in France.
He set it in America.
So what’s a French game studio to do when they want to make a game whose story is based
in America as authentic as possible?
DUH DUH DUH: Hire an American writer to come in and add some bald eagles, apple pie, and
some soaring verses of the Star Spangled banner.
So now that we know that we come back to Christian, in order for Christian to be considered as
a writer for the LIS team he had to take a writing test to convince DONTNOD that he was
the most qualified American outside of Babe Ruth, John Phillips Sousa, and Rosa Parks.
So Christian gets the job, queue more celebration, and he sits down with Jean Luc’s document
and gets to work.
He wasn’t doing this by himself.
Dontnod helped him along the way.
They gave him script ideas for when he’d write out everything in screenplay format.
They’d have ideas for how they’d want the mood for specific scenes, so they’d
say “we want it to be really soft or playful” or “we want it to have at least three bald
eagles swooping across a backdrop of an American flag.”
The latter is something I’m assuming happened, because America.
Christian found himself developing a rich world that included a phrase that some people
took to griping about.
Hella.
Now for Uber clarification, this video host and writer didn’t find much cringe worthiness
in the dialogue.
As a writer myself, I respected times one hundred and three that someone took the time
to develop a specific and contextual vocabulary for a video game character.
I’d just never seen that happen to the extent that Christian had done it, which lead me
to ask him about the gripe against the word, “hella.”
Regardless of how you feel about “hella,” the reception and success of LIS speaks for
itself.
People connected with it.
Something caught the emotions of players everywhere in a way that I hadn’t seen since picked
up my first plastic gun and short ducks that didn’t have backstory.
In the end, the story of Life is Strange didn’t change much between when Jean Luc first wrote
it and when Christian expanded it with the context of the Pacific Northwest in mind.
There were a few details in one or two scenes that changed, but the main story, the cliff
hangers on the end of episodes three and four, the diving into photographs, the relationship
between Chloe and Max; all of that was in the original draft.
Now, dear watcher, because you are a fantastic and amazing person, you’ve met your first
two paragraph architects.
You learned how they got their skillful hands on LIS and now you can go buy the game and
play it, and in those major moments where you realize there are massive globs of wet
dripping down your face, and your controller is covered in orange because you’re taking
your emotions out on a family sized bag of Nacho Cheesier Doritos.
And when the final scene plays and the proverbial curtain draws back, leaving you alone with
your inner demons, now you can shake your fist at the sky and yell,
“Curses on your dreadful talent to invoke all my feelings at once, Christian Divine!
Curses on your masterful French storytelling, Jean Luc Cano!”
At least you have that at the end of this video.
I’m Dave Connis, host of the stories behind, I’ll see you next time.