It’s been 30 years since Amy Hennig’s first game, Electrocop, and eight since she said goodbye to her most famous creation, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series. Informed as much by vintage Hollywood adventure films as the likes of Gears of War, Uncharted is the acme of the gun-toting blockbuster with a human face. It’s a style of production with which Hennig, a former film student, is indelibly associated, though I’ll always reserve my love for her first turn as director, 1999’s Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. But as she herself admits, it’s a style of game that is becoming untenable, involving vast expense and many years of labour, in an industry that has never been more conscious of the unhealthy workplace practices that prop up some of its most beloved experiences. Hence, perhaps, the untimely demise of her last project, Visceral’s Star Wars game “Ragtag”, as publisher EA moved its business away from finite narratives and into the murky waters of the game-as-service.
Hennig has spent the year and a half since leaving Visceral resting, catching up with family and meeting with potential partners. She has done some consultancy work at VR company The Void, and directed a volumetric video capture shoot for Intel. But she has also spent her absence from the limelight reflecting on the industry’s past and future, trying to make sense of what she calls “a time of massive change”. In a keynote discussion at last week’s Reboot Develop conference in Dubrovnik, Hennig spoke about looking beyond challenge, mastery and failstates as key criteria for game design. She is particularly enthused by real-time streaming platforms, suggesting that their promise of greater accessibility is an opportunity to fashion new genres for a broader audience. In the wake of her presentation, I sat down with Hennig to discuss all this, her time working on Star Wars, and whether the advent of real-time streaming is also an opportunity to change the way games are made.
I was reading your USGamer interview in February, where you talked about not quite knowing where to aim yourself after leaving Visceral. You’re known for these big budget, photoreal narrative action-adventures, and those are hard to create when you’re not an EA or Sony. How are things going with that thought process?
Amy Hennig: The reason I got into games in the first place – because I was planning to go into film – was that I stumbled into a job on a game, as a one-shot situation to make some money. But then I realised that there was a frontier there that had yet to be written. And interestingly at the same time in film school I was studying film theory and history, and we had learned a lot about Georges Méliès, the Lumiere brothers, Eisenstein, the people who figured out the language of film. And I loved the idea of joining an industry, a medium where it was still right there on the edge.
Now, especially in the triple-A space, there’s a certain quality of turning a big expensive crank, instead of that scrappy, improvisational, ad hoc quality we used to have. A lot of companies still have it, indies still have it, but when you’re in the big budget triple-A space, it’s like your challenges tend to be more production or organisational or institutional than they are about solving problems on the project. It’s not absolute, but it’s become more that way, or at least it was for me. And I was really missing that feeling of trying to crack a problem. So taking a step back after EA shuttered the studio allowed me to get into a space where things are undefined.
So I looked into VR for a while, which I still think is fascinating, because it’s also an industry, a medium that is in this nascent state where we haven’t learned to tell great stories yet, and I’d love to be part of that. I thought for a while, maybe I take my skills in storytelling, character, real-time content creation, and use them to create linear content, just take interactivity out of it. And it just felt like such a shame. I spent 30 years learning to be a game designer, and it felt like discarding a very important part of my experience. Particularly in a time when it seems like interactive entertainment is going to be bigger than it ever has been, and that’s where streaming comes in. That emerging over the course of the last year – I hadn’t even thought about it, but the advent of 5G, which is going to take a few years, it’s going to absolutely transform everything. It’s going to transform our media space, so not just games but the entertainment industry in general, and I think there’s an opportunity to really broaden the portfolio of games that we make, and it’s exciting to be part of that – of how we take what we do and reach a much broader audience.
Speaking of broadening the kinds of games you make, I’m interested to know how much of a departure your Visceral project, Ragtag, was from the games you’re celebrated for. Are there any ideas there you’d like to return to?
Amy Hennig: Oh sure! I have certain things that just seem to be my wheelhouse, that I keep going back to for whatever reason. I love the vibe of 1930s films, a lot of it’s sort of screwball comedies, adventures, all that stuff. There’s just something about that era that appeals to me, and I find myself landing there a lot. I also like scoundrelly characters, I like characters that are looking out for number one but need to rise to a higher purpose, and I keep working through that idea. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe it feels a little unoriginal if I keep landing on the same themes, but maybe I’m working something out – who knows.
“I realised that there was a frontier there that had yet to be written”
Obviously I was hired because of my track record, my resumé with Uncharted, to try to do the same thing for Star Wars. Because how do you deconstruct those films and then create an interactive experience that sits alongside all the material being made today? The roadmap originally when I joined, when I was working with Lucasfilm – you saw all of this stuff, and a lot of it back then was top secret, the saga films, the standalone films and where they were going to fall, the animated TV series building towards the live action TV series, and the games. And all of this stuff playing together, interlocking in this new canon. It was very cool to think that this game we were working on was just as relevant as the films, particularly the standalone films because that’s the best analogy, that it was being treated just as seriously, and that we were working through the story and all the original material we were creating for that reason.