Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies) – Part 2 interview
Written by Ingmar Böke
It will take you 26 minutes to read this interview.
In the first installment of our two-part interview, Sam Barlow and I discussed his upcoming adventure Telling Lies and the concept of "exploring" video. In the second half of our lengthy Skype conversation, we looked back at the genesis and evolution of this unique method of storytelling, Sam's involvement in the choice-driven WarGames, and the future of interactive movies.
Ingmar Böke: One thing I noticed about Her Story was that it has a very plausible explanation for avoiding being confronted with another character where you could directly ask questions in a live situation, and it seems the same goes for Telling Lies. Are certain limitations crucial for making games like Her Story and Telling Lies work?
Sam Barlow: Certainly, when I made Her Story, a lot of these things I was doing naively or on instinct. But in retrospect, my big passion in games when I was a kid was text adventures. I loved the magic of the text parser; the idea at least that you could type anything and it will happen. And every now and again, there would be a text game where that was true. But in general, you knew that there were a set of ten or twenty verbs that would get you through most games. And if I am playing a text game and I say something and the game doesn’t understand it and I get a stupid answer, instantly it’s a buzzkill. Whereas in Her Story, I understood it is a constraint that if I search for a word and it wasn’t said, it’s not there. Some of the best responses I had to Her Story were people saying that despite the artifice of the whole thing, despite the fact that it was about being sat in front of the computer, once they were immersed in it, they had the feeling of having a conversation with Viva’s character in a way that felt more organic and immersive than the act of talking to a simulated NPC in another video game. So I think it was by not having to worry about some of that suspension of disbelief and supporting some of those things, I think it definitely frees you up.
Viva Seifert's impressive multi-layered performance was crucial in creating a player connection to Her Story's Hannah Smith |
I was really interested when people said that they had this real sense of a connection, of intimacy, of some kind of interpersonal dialogue with Viva’s character in Her Story, so with Telling Lies I really wanted to dig into that. Like, how is that unique? One of the things I thought a bit about was, if you’re watching a movie and there is a scene in a bedroom between two characters talking – you know, some pillow talk or having some dramatic discussion – either it’s shot "invisibly" where you are not aware of the camera because it’s using the conventions of cinema and you’re essentially the invisible observer and there is no sense that you are eavesdropping, so it’s fine that you’re present in the scene. Or there is a David Lynch-type movie and it’s been shot through the slats of a cupboard; you can play up the presence of the camera and a sense of voyeurism and the sense that you are listening in to a conversation you shouldn’t be. I think this game creates an interesting middle ground where you have some presence in the scene – the interactivity gives you some personal connection to it – but really the nearest analogy to what I was trying to do here is novels.
What is unique about novels is that you are inside the mind of a character. You can be present in their thought processes, you’re seeing everything through their eyes, and in most novels that doesn’t feel at all icky or voyeuristic. You just get a sense of this intense insight about the character by seeing the world from their perspective. And Telling Lies’ format gives you some of that because the amount of work your imagination is doing to fill in the blanks, to infer what’s happening on the other side of the conversation, the freedom you have to move around in these scenes, really does compel you to inhabit these characters using your imagination in a way that reminds me somewhat of the novelistic feel. At the same time, you have the advantages of filmed performance – you see these characters, you can infer what is going on and you can have that emotional reaction to the scene and the acting and stuff.
It’s definitely 100% something that emerges from the constructs, that I think was a learning process for me. It was something I believed I was proving with Her Story, that so often in video games the conventional logic now is that nothing needs to be left to the imagination. A video game is different from film in that I can see 360 degrees around the location – if I want to walk over to the fridge and open it, I can do that. If I’m playing Grand Theft Auto and a character goes from one side of the town to another, I can sit in the car and drive, stop at every light and see every street corner. And so there is this idea that video games can unpack and unspool and give you everything. The idea of avoiding cutscenes to some extent is that everything will happen in real time; you will see everything unfold, and the pacing is a different thing. There’s also a challenge in a video game that so often the story is also your mission objective and is also your tutorial and is your guidepost telling you what to do next. It was found that in making a conventional video game, it was important that everything was explained. If your character needs to go over this hill to kill a dragon, then it needs to be really obvious. Some other character is going to say “you need to go over the hill and kill a dragon,” whereas good storytelling oftentimes would have characters talking about their breakfast and the subtext is that he is going to kill the dragon.
What I found when I was preparing Her Story was, particularly in an interactive story where you already have the player’s brain and imagination engaged in your story, I think actually showing less, creating deliberate gaps for their imagination to fill, is super-powerful. Some of the earlier video games had levels of abstraction that were necessary, not in real time but because graphics couldn’t actually show you everything. Those were subtle ways in which we were encouraging imagination. I think accidentally with Her Story, and knowingly with Telling Lies, it is very much about deliberately telling a story through some of the negative space. Telling a story in which you are always only seeing a portion of what was happening.
Again, this is anti-cinematic; the story is very dramatic, but if they were shooting a Hollywood movie of this, they would be filming entirely different scenes. Here we are only seeing our characters when they talk to each other online, in this building captured by the government. So if something big happens in a character’s life, there’s no reason that they’d be filming it, so we don’t see it. If two characters are together in the same room, they are probably not Skyping each other so we probably don’t see those moments. So a lot of times the big plot events in the story are not happening on-screen, in the way that in a Shakespearean play King Henry would run in from the battle and would be like, “oh my God that battle was awful, I saw a hundred men killed!” You are imagining this incredible battle, and you only see the before and after, and we are very much in that world. And that is such a lovely constraint because it gives you the moments that are more personal and more intimate, and it allows you to imagine these bigger events and add that colour to everything. That exercises the muscle of your imagination, which is already engaged because you’re in this interactive world and you are making choices, you’re paying attention, you’re listening to what people are saying, you’re taking notes of words and phrases, you’re inferring from this other clip you saw, “Oh! Now understand what was happening; I understand who this other person is.”
I think it’s very powerful to encourage people, by necessity, to use their imaginations. If I am sat in the cinema or I’m on my sofa reading a book, 10% of my body is engaged with flipping the pages and stopping the book from falling out of my hands, 5% is engaged with eating popcorn, but the vast majority of my mental processes are engaged in watching the story on the screen and suspending my disbelief and empathising with characters and imagining what’s going to happen next. We’re putting the full force of our imagination and all of our weird human programming into making this story come to life. But if you go over to... let’s say a military shooter, now I’m holding this device with two sticks and a bunch of buttons or a mouse and a keyboard, and I’m now looking at a two-dimensional representation of a 3D battlefield, and I’m choosing where to point my crosshairs and I’m tracking moving targets and I’m shooting them, I’m worrying about my ammo count, I’m deciding whether to switch to this other weapon, and I’m thinking about my larger objective, how I will have to get from A to B to C. I’m managing all of this stuff, and at the same time there’s a story going on. So the amount of my brain that I have left over to care about characters, to do all the stuff I would be doing in other story mediums is much smaller. So some video games will alternate. They will give me all the adrenaline of an incredible fast-paced action scene, and then there would be a cut scene in which the story moments happen. That’s Uncharted, essentially. Uncharted would slow things down and allow me to walk through a marketplace so I can engage in conversation.
Her Story is a part text-adventure, part FMV mystery based on keywords recognized by the video database |
The beautiful sweet spot that I accidentally discovered with Her Story was by making the game mechanic be literally the story itself. You had a much tighter synthesis here, because I’m watching a scene and I’m suspending disbelief and I’m being moved by the characters and I’m empathising with them and I’m thinking about plot, and I’m thinking about what happened here, what is going to happen, what didn’t happen. I’m doing all that and I’m listening to the words they are speaking and inferring the subtext from what they’re saying, and that is all inextricably linked to the story and gameplay. Because picking up on that character name or that turn of phrase is how I navigate to the next clip. Putting the pieces of the story together is mastery over this world of video.
So it’s super-fun because you get some of that deep immersive connection that you have to a video game through its mechanics, but it’s embedded and enmeshed directly in the story. The best bits of a traditional adventure game would achieve that. Sometimes there are great puzzles or great sequences in classic adventure games which pull that off where you’re in the world and the mechanics are to do with the plot and the story and the characters, and it feels fantastic. And then you get stuck with the busy work, and then the mechanics and the story will separate, like oil and water. But yes, very much there is this sweet spot I’ve discovered that reiterates constraints, enables us to combine story and mechanics in a way that is never frustrating.
It wasn’t widely held but the occasions where people would ask if Her Story is really a game, I was never too bothered about because I knew how complicated and interactive a thing it was, how much involvement your brain has with it. So for me whether you call it a game or not, I always felt like it was sufficiently rich and interesting as a piece of interactive entertainment. Take something like Uncharted, which is completely valid but every player is experiencing the same sequence in the same way. Everything in that game is geared towards making you press the button when they want you to, so it all works quite beautifully. Screw up or try to do something that it is not anticipating, it pulls apart, and so really, as much as that is an interactive piece of adventure and storytelling, it’s not giving you, the user, a heck of a lot of agency or respect. Whereas something like Her Story is genuinely going to let you move around, go in directions that you want, and you are free to do that. But every time you’re watching a clip, you’re thinking on several levels, you’re listening and paying attention. It is not the bad idea of an interactive movie where you press a button and sit back. You’re pressing it and leaning in and thinking about it. The idea of this enhanced scrubbing mechanic, the idea of dropping you into different parts of the clips, was to keep you connected and to keep a finger on the mouse or a touch screen as you’re playing this. It really is a very interactive experience.
Ingmar: Can you tell me a little bit more about the four main characters in Telling Lies? Is there anything that you can tease about them?
Sam: I’ve been very bad about answering these questions. Someone else was like, “okay just tell me their names,” and I was like, “nah.”
Ingmar: You don’t have to. We can move on if you want.
Sam: We have these four main characters and they are played by a wonderful cast. There are many other characters as well, but essentially the fun thing about it for me is that of these four main characters, depending on how you play, any one of them can be the protagonist in the right story. Something I found interesting in structuring the game is we allow people to choose who the protagonist is. Essentially the person you spend the most time with and fix your idea of the story around becomes more important. We did this exercise where we had people come in and play for three or four hours, and at the end we asked them to, in a paragraph or so, tell us what is the story. And we had this beautiful spread where people would fix on a different character, whether it was Angela or Alex or Kerry or Logan. They would tell the story from that character’s perspective. Then we had one tester who was so into Angela’s character that she somehow managed to pretty much only watch stuff with her; she was able to just explore this story purely through the scenes involving Angela’s character, which was super-cool.
Telling Lies has a bigger cast than Her Story, with notable Hollywood talent (L-R) Logan Marshall-Green, Alexandra Shipp, Kerry Bishé and Angela Sarafyan |
It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, because in that way it’s different to Her Story. Her Story was very much… you might have a different perspective on the story, or learn some things your friends haven’t, but essentially everyone’s digging into the same story. There are some plot points that people might miss, but in the sacred five or ten minutes at the start of the game, you definitely see people kind of laying down which character draws them into the story. That becomes quite fixed. Even in TV shows that have multiple characters and jump back and forth, there’s something different about that. This way you get to choose to follow a character, attempt to follow a character, dig further into a character. It feels like you have some ownership over that.
Ingmar: To my knowledge, Telling Lies has not been announced for consoles. Is there a possibility of that happening, and do you think that, generally speaking, there is a good way of making games with a text parser work on consoles?
Sam: I think there is definitely a strong possibility of that happening. There are a number of tweaks to how this game works above and beyond Her Story that actually kind of free you up. The typing is always there as an option, but part of wanting to encourage people to lose themselves was tweaking some of this. There’s a lot of emphasis on you being in a clip, moving around and scrubbing to discover things, and when you’re in a clip, if someone says a word you can just click the word or touch the word, and immediately search against that. So I really wanted to encourage you, if you saw something interesting, rather than write it down on a piece of paper and come back to it… again with my Nintendo analogy is that when I play Zelda I feel free. If I see an interesting thing, I will just wander over to it. I don’t have that busy work thing, where I’m like “aw, I gotta stick to the path, I need to do my mission, and I’m gonna ignore that thing.” I want you to do similarly when playing Telling Lies. Someone says something or mentions something and you’re like, “oh, that sounds interesting” and click, jump to that. So to make you feel better about doing that, there is a lot more in the virtual software here to allow you to track the clips you see and bookmark them and store that so that you can feel free, like you’re not going to miss something if you don’t have it written down.
The interface for Telling Lies has been tweaked to include direct keyword selection, though Her Story's text parser will remain an option |
So yes, we’re going to have controller support on PC and Mac anyway, because I know a lot of people played Her Story with friends and family on the big picture mode or otherwise connected their laptops or whatever to the TV. We found that actually playing it with a controller is a lot more straightforward this time around because of the way in which things flow and the ability to jump around and strike directly the words being spoken. So definitely, it makes it a lot more straightforward to put things on a console.
The number of people I know that played this on a TV wanted to because it lends itself so much to playing it with your partner or your friends. It’s kinda cool. There aren’t many video games where… this probably isn’t true anymore; my kids’ generation love their YouTube, but for me, if I’m sat on a sofa watching someone else play a video game, there is always that frustration of them being in control and driving things. The difference with Her Story was that the gameplay itself, because it kind of floats above the actual game, the act of watching stuff, discussing it and talking about what they should be searching for and stuff, really lends itself to that.
So yeah, getting it in as many places as possible, making it as easy for people to play this thing, it’s definitely a priority.
Ingmar: No matter how many political elements a game contains, for obvious reasons AAA developers and publishers tend to claim that their games are not political at all, and don't contain any statements about current real-world events. Now, Telling Lies is not a AAA game, but it is set in the real world, and it covers a subject like NSA surveillance. Actually, earlier you said that you used to call Telling Lies a "political thriller". It would be very interesting to hear a bit more about this aspect, and how much of your own opinions about the state of the world can be found in the game.
Sam: Telling Lies is definitely a political game. It's about things that happen to real people in the real world and so clearly touches upon subjects that are political, as pretty much any story that has some tether to reality does. I also think it's a game that has an opinion about those political questions that it touches on – not one that it states literally for the audience, but one which I can only imagine is baked into its whole experience. It would be lazy or unfair for me to leave those opinions entirely in the hands of its players. I came to this story from a very personal, character-driven perspective but there's no separating people and politics and I have very strong opinions about some of the themes we explore. As does Amelia, who wrote with me, as do the actors who brought the characters to life, as does everyone on the team. Perhaps one of the greatest responsibilities I feel on this project is doing justice to these themes and being truthful above all else.
Ingmar: You’ve mentioned Zelda a couple of times, but when it comes to storytelling in games in general, which ones have particularly impressed you throughout the last few years?
Sam: Of the few that I’ve allowed myself to play – ’cause the act of making an independent video game is to do that at the exclusion of all other fun – I continue to be a huge fan of Kentucky Route Zero. Some of the bits and pieces they do… there’s a bit in, I think it’s Act Two where your characters visit this museum, but you’re seeing it from the perspective of the people you spoke to being interviewed at a later date about what they said to you. And the dialogue choices that you get, the traditional kind of choice-based story happening through the voices of these characters in the future… it creates so many interesting layers, raising the question of who’s the protagonist? What does it mean to be an interactive audience member? Are you role-playing the character? I’m fascinated by those kinds of questions. And I think they do some wonderful things in Kentucky Route Zero, as well as it being beautiful in terms of atmosphere and visuals.
inkle's Heaven's Vault is one of the newer games whose ambitious storytelling elements are largely unheralded |
I just started playing Heaven’s Vault, which has some rough edges but there’s a humbleness to what inkle does, ’cause they’re doing stuff that is so much more ambitious and so much further along in terms of this idea of using procedural, systemic elements to kind of rearrange a story and shuffle it around what you’re doing. They’re doing that so much more than anyone else is. And I think to some extent people don’t necessarily realize it. You know, if this was EA making this game you would’ve watched a hundred hours of promo videos explaining how clever the story system was.
Ingmar: (laughs) Right.
Sam: And they don’t do that. So it’s easy to miss in some ways. It’s such a specific thing, which I love. Like, it makes no concessions. I mean, it is the love child of the Westwood Blade Runner game and The Last Express.
Ingmar: Sounds good!
Sam: It has a unique visual style. It’s a detective story which kind of auto-shuffles itself. And the world it’s set in is this curious, very analogue kind of future. It has a lot of Gene Wolfe-type stuff in there about these kinds of civilisations on top of other civilisations. Super, incredibly ambitious.
I obviously loved [The Return of the] Obra Dinn, not necessarily as a piece of storytelling in the way that I would define a story, but speaking as someone that’s thought about what mechanics can you build around the idea of being a detective? It was super-interesting to see them solve that question in a different way by having each individual murder be very simple. Multiple choice questions, essentially, but we’re going to have a hundred murders. And that’s where the richness comes from. And I really admired the way they solved the content problem. Having these elaborate freeze frames I thought was really beautiful with the voice-over, ’cause they were very detailed and interesting and dramatic. I thought it was a more artful compromise than, say, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, where you would have ghostly bodies acting out entire scenes. Having the specificity of those frozen dioramas was super-cool, and it’s a fantastic constraint to try to tell a story around that.
Lucas Pope's Return of the Obra Dinn is another modern adventure with a novel approach to mystery investigation
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And then for the developer to basically execute on every possible variation within those constraints. Lucas [Pope, developer] was probably essentially going, "well, how many ways can people die? And how many ways can I identify them through their accent, their clothing, their belt buckles, their tattoos, their uniforms, where they are physically on a ship, and how detailed do you go on thinking about life on board a ship and stuff?" That for me is one of the things that’s only possible in independent games, because no one is going to allow you to spend five years as he did being obsessive about those details in a way that you can if you’re only answering to yourself. Similarly in Telling Lies, there are very strange, specific things and I’ve gone very deep and been very indulgent in directions that I think if I was answerable to a more conventional higher power it would be hard to justify.
Ingmar: Not that long ago, Eko, an interactive storytelling platform, released WarGames, which was a project that you did for them. It seems more like a traditional interactive movie than in comparison to something that is rather, let’s say, gamey or mechanical. Can you tell me a bit about WarGames and your involvement with Eko?
Sam: That project kind of morphed at several points along the way. But originally it was going to be one of several shows, and it was definitely conceived of as a show. Like that whole question of calling something a game or a show or a movie or whatever, I was quite happy to call it a show because ultimately if you sat and did nothing the show would happen. Whereas something like Her Story, nothing happens unless the player interacts, right? It requires a constant interaction, it requires a constant feedback loop.
I was interested in getting into that because the idea of a choose your own adventure or a traditional choice-based thing is something I’ve never gelled with. I just wrestled with that idea of the protagonist and what does it mean to make choices on their behalf. When I did some of Shattered Memories, I had this idea where all the story branches and all the dynamic story content was kind of hidden from the player. There weren’t these overt choices that you would get like in a BioWare game or a Telltale game, which for me was an interesting take on it. So WarGames was an attempt to do that for a very mainstream audience.
It was an interesting project. It was challenging for me to not write it personally, as we had someone else come in and write it, which is definitely the case of when you’re in this kind of interactive world, you really want the writer to be someone that is super-immersed in exactly how the mechanics of the thing works. My background, and I think we’re seeing with Netflix and stuff, oftentimes you will have a linear writer creating something and then have some steering coming from someone with more interactive experience. But I definitely feel more comfortable when I’m directly writing it.
It was fun, but I think it didn’t necessarily find its audience. It was conceived of as a genuine reboot of the movie in the way that the original movie was aimed at teenaged boys who were obsessed with hacking and was a pretty cool piece of wish fulfillment-slash-Cold War drama for that particular person. We really wanted to make something that was aimed at a modern set of kids that were interested in that. We wanted to show a colourful representation of the modern hacking world, which is not as is often portrayed on TV. It was conceived of as a pilot, so then the idea of breaking it down and it being a show and being several small episodes was something that came kind of late in the date. I think structurally it works far better if you just sit and are immersed in it for a couple of hours, versus seeing it as a piece of episodic narrative. But it was a very useful project in terms of thinking out some of the ideas behind Telling Lies, as well as getting my head around how to shoot this thing and some of the research into what digital communication has done to people’s lives.
Ingmar: Speaking of Netflix, did you have a chance to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch? And if you did, how did you feel about it and do you think that interactive content on streaming platforms can become a bigger thing at some point in the future?
Sam: I think it was possibly the right decision for them to have it be somewhat simple so that it would run smoothly on the huge number of devices involved. I was impressed by the fact that they executed it, that they managed to deliver something with high production values that worked, that the audience understood. But it’s always hard for someone that’s been in and around the interactive fiction community for a while and to know the level of evolution and sophistication that has grown within that community. Even something as simple as the choose your own adventure has become a lot more complicated and interesting and nuanced. So it’s frustrating that Bandersnatch was essentially a 1980s choose your own adventure.
Ingmar: Right.
Sam: But lampshading and foregrounding that as the gimmick of the story being built around ‘80s choose your own adventures facilitated that and allowed them to get away with it. So I think the real challenge now is having done Bandersnatch and it being a success, it possibly makes things harder for everybody else now because it feels like they’ve solved some problems but they haven’t necessarily. Because no one else can do that again. You know the next big budget interactive TV drama cannot be about kids in the ‘80s doing choose your own adventures.
Ingmar: And Black Mirror was a great IP to choose because it isn’t an ongoing series. Different characters each time.
Sam: Yeah, and it has a meta quality to it that if Black Mirror makes an episode about choose your own adventure games, then it’s a choose your own adventure game. So I think it’s going to be interesting. It’s the most successful example of this that anyone has pulled off yet, so it feels like a victory and it feels like a step forward. But it’s hard to see exactly what follows it. If a competitor is now looking to put out something that goes beyond Bandersnatch, there’s a lot of challenges that they have to overcome. But it’s inevitable that all these platforms have to solve this problem. The meetings I’ve had with various people in Hollywood, they all know that they’re losing mindshare to video games. They know that they have an audience that has a hundred and one more distractions than watching television. In the ‘60s, sitting down and watching television is what everybody did. And it was a very strong business model. And it was that way up until very recently. Now even the Netflixes know that they’re competing with Fortnite (laughs).
Ingmar: Exactly.
Sam: So they’re all obsessively trying to figure out “how do we respect the fact that these people have expectations around immersion and interactivity and personalisation and what does that look like when applied to a TV show?” In some ways I think Her Story and Telling Lies is one answer to that question. It’s to completely take the muscle memory we have from actually interacting with the digital world and take the way we actually consume content and have that be the structure of the experience. But it’s also a battle to take that conventional TV show and try to inject this more direct interactivity into it. There’s lots of challenges. So, it’s interesting times. Everyone is having a go at it in different ways and at some point you’ve gotta imagine there will be the thing that lands in a way that satisfies.
Telltale's The Walking Dead was a hugely successful, if ultimately short-lived, step forward in choice-based interactive storytelling |
To some extent in games, maybe The Walking Dead was a little bit like Bandersnatch. It was the perfect IP for the tech at the time. It was a comic, it was zombies, so there was always this external threat that could move you on and tie the story threads back together and these super-intense life or death decisions. So I think The Walking Dead was the perfect example of that format, and then a lot of people jumped on that format, including Telltale themselves, and attempted to kind of fill that out. But that was definitely one of the better examples of how we can tell a significant character-based story that’s like a traditional TV show and have some interactivity. But there’s a lot more questions and interesting challenges when you throw it into genuine live action – which I think is the opportunity – and Bandersnatch squanders that because technically they are limited to having the thirty seconds lead time, right? You make a choice and you sit and wait. So it happens. And the choices are binary so it never really feels like real person.
I think the nearest I’ve come to experiencing it in a game would be Oxenfree; the fluidity of the choices you make in Oxenfree and none of those are big story branches. It’s all just about what characters are saying to each other, but choose something and it flows into the conversation and you make another choice and it flows and you make another choice. So there’s a density of choice and there’s a speed of reactivity to those choices and it feels magical and fun. I think if you did that in live action… we’re so trained to do invisible editing in live action that when you watch a TV show you are watching something that is assembled from multiple parts and it’s been cobbled together offline in an editing suite, but in my head there is something that is as reactive as Oxenfree that is able to assemble things in real time because we don’t notice cuts when they happen in a conventional television program. That would feel very fluid and magical and possibly the tech isn’t quite there yet; possibly the effort to actually execute on it isn’t there yet.
Ingmar: Now before we come to the end I really want to thank you very much for giving me so much time for this interview.
Sam: Oh, no problem. The whole world is so scary to someone somewhat old like me, and so speaking to a journalist that has a website... I understand that’s how you reach an audience and so I’m very grateful for anyone that’s out there talking about my stuff. ‘Cause I’m not making the kind of thing where I can just send it to the top five streamers (laughs) and have them play it with their audience. It doesn’t really work for me.
Ingmar: Perhaps that’s a good thing. But of course I can’t let you go without asking you about the latest release date estimate when it comes to Telling Lies.
Sam: There isn’t a huge amount to do to finish it, but with this one we are localizing so we’re going to have subtitles in a whole ton of languages, which obviously is more complicated than it would be in a normal game. So that is proceeding but I’m very hopeful that we will have this in people’s hands during the warm weather and the sooner the better. So that’s as much as I will narrow it down. (laughs) But yeah, the end is near. It feels like it’s taken me a while this time. It’s been a few years but it’s just the pace of the world. There’s part of me that’s terrified that when this game comes out the world will have changed so much or some things will happen that it will make this game pointless. So I’m like, please just get it out while we still have a functioning internet and people can download it and the story of the game is somewhat relevant. So that’s my impetus.
Interview transcription provided by Richard Hoover, Joe Keeley and Shuva Raha.