When a 12-year-old Christian Cantamessa sat in bed reading The Lord of the Rings, he never thought he’d ever get the chance to one day create his own story set in Tolkien’s world with Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Nor, as he walked down the aisle on his wedding day to the Game of Thrones theme tune, Brad Kane couldn’t imagine writing his own Westerosi story through the Telltale series. And the same goes for CD Projekt Red’s Marcin Blacha and Magdalena Zych, who as children read Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books – Wiedźmin in the original Polish, where it’s practically required reading.
These writers have each created video game stories set in established and beloved fantasy epics, but despite the opportunities to do so, they are fantasies in their own right – real dreams come true – there are countless challenges and pressures that come with it.
Take, for example, The Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien created a whole plane of existence with its own history, myth, politics, and so on. He did this not just through the main series of novels, but through countless smaller stories and unfinished stories, not to mention the sheer amount of adaptations that added layers upon layers of lore.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor by Monolith Productions is set in the midst of this complex web, and lead writer Christian Cantamessa worked with the Tolkien Estate (the legal body that controls the late author’s work) alongside a writer who worked on the film adaptations of Peter Jackson and a literal Lord of the Rings scholar to create a lore-accurate story. “It was helpful to say, ‘Hey, what you’re doing here isn’t going to work, because this is happening here or there’s a statement in the book that contradicts it,’ and we never wanted that,” Cantamessa says.
A similar process is underway at The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, as senior writer Magdalena Zych says staying accurate with the source material — a collection of eight novels dating back decades — is almost as important as creating a strong story in the first place. “Of course we supplement the material, we extend it, sometimes we even change it, but the latter is never accidental,” she says. “It’s vital that we keep The Witcher’s world intact or we’d be wasting it and ruining what makes it so appealing: its integrity.
“When it comes to RPGs, the most important thing is the story,” Zych continues. “Regardless of what it’s based on, it has to mature first, be engaging, immerse the player, provide the right mix of emotions, and provide players with choices that seem impossible to make. But staying true to the source material is a close second, especially when you’re working on such a beloved franchise.”
Creative bureaucracy
Staying true to the source material can also be limiting, according to Brad Kane, co-writer of several episodes of Telltale’s Game of Thrones and a canceled second season. Kane was a longtime fan of the series, even before the hit HBO show, and says it was a dream come true to be immersed in Westeros and Essos every day. But writing in someone else’s world was “probably more limiting and limiting than liberating,” he says.
“On more than one occasion, we had pretty good ideas that HBO would come back and say we couldn’t do it, and that’s partly because that’s where they went with the story. A very nice idea was suggested early in the show by [fellow writer] Meghan Thornton about this whole discussion about an ice dragon in the far north,” Kane explains. The Telltale series was released in 2014, the same year that HBO released the fourth season of Game of Thrones and thus spoilers, three years before it created its own ice dragon.
There are, of course, strategies to avoid stepping on your toes, Kane says, and the main one the Telltale team used was to find a small starting point from George RR Martin’s novels, which could then be used to create a new space. The main characters of the game come from House Forrester, a family that is only mentioned once, and very briefly, in the books. “We deliberately didn’t enter a deep-seated stronghold,” explains Kane. “We needed the freedom to create a gameplay sandbox, have characters that could live or die, and do something that felt original to the world.
“We really can’t change much about Daenerys Targaryen or Tyrion Lannister,” he continues. “They’re known amounts, and we’re in a certain period of time in the show’s chronology, so we can’t do much with where they’ve been and where they’re going. The challenge was not to have them become these unwavering, powerful character powers, but rather to have something that we can interact with and be part of the gameplay experience.”
Keeping this gameplay in mind is another crucial part of a video game writer’s job, Cantamessa explains, as the task is much more complex than just writing a plot synopsis and a handful of cutscenes. Coming up with a character that fits perfectly into the story and the world of the source material is not enough. “He also has to serve a function for the game,” Cantamessa says, “and juggling all these things is a little harder.
“They have to be able to fit within the mechanics of those kinds of stories, and that gives them an extra handhold. Once all those guidelines are down, you have a little wiggle room, but you don’t have much.”
play area
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s main antagonist – the Black Hand of Sauron – is an example of combining these concepts, as Cantamessa explains how he and the writing team took a small starting point from The Lord of the Rings books and the character a goal in their game. “That was actually [creative director Michael de Plater’s] idea, to actually personify a line from the book that refers to the black hand of Sauron.”
While there’s debate as to whether this line was talking about a literal body part or something more, the writing team adapted it to mean “the Black Hand of Sauron is one who does what he pleases,” Cantamessa says. “We embodied the spirit Tolkien was trying to convey with that sentence, with that paragraph, with that page of the story.”
Some of the characters are a bit more obvious, he added, such as the inclusion of Gollum as a quest giver, although even this has been thought through deeply to ensure he’d be in the right place at the right time in the game. wider Lord of the Rings lore.
According to Marcin Blacha, director of The Witcher’s story, using these familiar characters can often make the writer’s work easier, and seeing familiar faces also helps establish the game’s authenticity in the wider lore. “There are three pillars of The Witcher books: characters, an original take on fantasy styles, and the dialogue it has with our reality,” he says. “In an adaptation, it makes the job easier for the storytelling teams because they can start working on a story with characters and the relationships between them without having to create or figure out those relationships from scratch.”
Staying true to the source material
While CD Projekt Red has adopted a similar strategy to Cantamessa’s Black Hand of Sauron with characters like The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings’ Iorveth, which was only mentioned a handful of times in the books, it has also committed to taking beloved characters straight from to get the books. Sapkowski’s pages. This is, of course, spearheaded by protagonist Geralt of Rivia, but the stories of Yennefer, Dandelion, Ciri and many more have all been expanded in the game series.
Regis is another main character that was brought back in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Blood and Wine expansion, and one who (again, spoilers) got very dead at the end of the novel’s main saga. “To allow it to regenerate and come back to life in the relatively short time that elapses between [the books] and Blood and Wine might have been a little long in terms of The Witcher lore, but it was worth it,” says Zych.
“Of course we didn’t have the freedom with Regis [like] when it came to writing Iorveth: Regis was already a very outspoken, very well developed character and we had to be extremely careful to do him justice. The way he looks, the way he talks, his friendship with Geralt, his way of thinking, his views – everything had to be as it was written in the books, otherwise he wouldn’t be himself.”
While the end result is incredibly rewarding, getting there is hard, and unsurprisingly, a writer isn’t incredibly eager to tackle a project with so many lines behind it, not to mention a flawless prestige. This was certainly the case for Cantamessa before starting Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, who admitted he was hesitant to write within a franchise as beloved and artistically sacred as The Lord of the Rings.
“On the one hand I’m like, ‘Hey, this can be done, it’s done, it’s really hard and I’d love to do it,'” he says. “On the other hand, as a fan but also as a normally anxious person, I’m very worried that they could fail and I could do a bad job and then – not so much if it reflects negatively on myself – it was just something I am very excited about. When you’re a fan of something, you want to make sure that whatever you do, it doesn’t get worse.”
Fortunately for Cantamessa, the game was very well received, removing much of that pressure. “As big fans, we certainly did our best to respect the material, create something new and make a good game,” he says.
But what would Tolkien, who died in 1973 and so long before video games became the storytelling mediums they are today, think of his story? “Oh god,” Cantamessa laughs. “I hope he doesn’t turn in his grave.
“There’s something in the back of my mind that makes me think Tolkien would be happy with the work we’ve done, which Peter Jackson has done, and frankly, all the papers have done.
“In one of his letters, he says that he was creating this new mythology. And he says he hoped some of the parts he had outlined would come and other ghosts would come and fill them in with music, drama, and poetry.
“Of course video games didn’t exist, but I think he was open to the idea that other ghosts would come and fill in some of these sketches that he made. He never wrote, “I hope no one touches my stuff.” And so we just took the parts he sketched out and we started playing with them, and so at least I know I didn’t betray anything he believed in.”
Some quotes have been edited for clarity.
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