Gary Whitta says 'The Walking Dead' video game was his most challenging project.
The Walking Dead
The 44-year-old screenwriter, author and games designer was hired to write the script for 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' and he's most recently been involved in the writer's room of the third 'Sherlock Holmes' movie.
But when it comes overseeing the narrative development of Telltale Games' video game adaptation of 'The Walking Dead', he admitted he has faced his toughest project yet.
He explained: "It's by far the most challenging medium, most challenging form of writing I've ever done. You want to create compelling characters and a story that people will, you know, tune back into for the next episode and you want to surprise them and do things that are original and unexpected and not cliche, all of those things."
Whilst it has the same burdens as film and television, video games also have to allow the player to be the co-writer too.
He added: "They get to decide if this character lives or dies or if this character's a good guy or a bad guy, and so to be able to allow the audience to have that level of participation and at the same time make sure that whatever story they decide to experience is as satisfying as any other and they have a good time no matter what they choose."
'The Walking Dead' games series is based on the series of the same name, starting at the onset of a zombie apocalypse, where dead humans have become undead "walkers" that feed on the living. A virus is contracted within all living humans and this takes over the brain once the person dies and the only way to stop this is to destroy the brain.
And although the game was a challenge, Whitta admitted the results were rewarding.
He told Collider: "It's hard for me to explain how difficult it is, but once you kind of have your hands in the guts of the mindbending logic of all the different stories...[it's] really satisfying because when people play the game, they all experience something different.
"And so anytime you talk to someone about the TV show they might have different views, but you saw the same show. If you talk to someone about The Walking Dead video game, they actually had a different experience, their story wasn't the same as someone else's. So that's really interesting, it's just a lot of hard work to get there."
Tagged in Guy Richie