Video Game Creators Seek Out Hollywood for Robust Narratives<br />“At Naughty Dog, each narrative beat is infused with not just the ideas of the writers, but also by design, art, and more.”<br />Gary Whitta, whose film-writing credits include “The Book of Eli,” “After Earth,”<br />and last year’s “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” said he had seen how storytelling went from nonexistent in games to becoming “more the standard.” Mr. Whitta, who got his start as a gaming journalist, has consulted on narrative and story development for a number of video games, including Microsoft’s popular first-person shooter series Gears of War.<br />Last December, Naughty Dog, the studio behind blockbuster action-adventure franchises like Uncharted and The Last of Us, announced<br />that Halley Gross, a writer and story editor on HBO’s “Westworld,” would help write the studio’s coming game, The Last of Us Part II.<br />Mr. Samuels sought out Larry Fessenden, an American screenwriter<br />and director whose credits include the horror films “Wendigo” and “The Last Winter,” and the screenplay for “Orphanage,” an in-development English language remake of the Spanish horror film “El Orfanato” from the director Guillermo del Toro.<br />When Pete Samuels, a founder and the chief executive of Supermassive Games, began working on a survival horror adventure<br />video game called Until Dawn in 2015, he knew he wanted the story to unfold like that of a horror film.<br />With a story-based game, you expect to be able to exercise some agency over how the story unfolds — or at least to experience the story in a way<br />that feels more intimate and personal than a film or television show.
