eat.sleep.geek.

Despite impressive sales numbers, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that if you bought the Iron Man game that came out last summer to coincide with the release of Marvel Studio’s movie of the same name, you were a little disappointed. I didn’t mind the game, and still felt like something was missing. As part of their commitment to try and stop the spread of bad video games into the lymph nodes of their intellectual properties, Marvel insisted that current Invincible Iron Man writer Matt Fraction co-write Sega’s upcoming Iron Man 2 title. Fraction, who was brought on board after development started, and hasn’t had any experience writing for video games sat down with gamasutra.com to talk about process and the differences of writing for comics and games.

The interview is pretty standard stuff, it was harder that he expected, there was lots of collaboration, and all the generic things you’d expext a comic writer to say about doing some work on video games. However, he did have this to say about how his time on Invincible Iron Man affected him when writing the game

Well, I had been writing the book for almost two years at this point, and I started to feel a little proprietary about it, a little possessive, like I know something about something.

I just wanted Tony [and] the [other] characters to sound like they sounded in my head a little bit, and to try and write the sort of game that I would want to play, a little bit. You know, the kind of cutscenes that wouldn’t make me want to hit the X button a little quicker.

In my mind at least, there’s not much doubt that one of the things that kills superhero games is mediocre cutscenes. I’m considerably more tolerant of other types of games that have average cutscenes, but if I’ve spent 25 years following a character I tend to get pretty picky about how those 45 seconds play out.

Fraction, who’s a gamer, went on to talk about how his ideas for the story went beyond just the cut scenes and delved into gameplay as well.

At one point I had thought, “Oh, it would be great [if] then, at this point, there can be a level that’s like a first-person shooter, the character is trying to escape from a place. We can just go into that! That would be cool. There’s this weird first-person segment in the middle of the game!”

And they were like, “Yeah, no. We can’t do that.” I was like, “Oh, okay, I gotcha.”

It’s stuff like that. Or, for example, you can’t suddenly turn it into a piloting game. The game is the game, and it’s about the designers building the game. There was a learning curve that I had to adapt to very quickly.

I might be in the minority here, but if Matt Fraction cooks up an Iron Man story and has thoughts on how different types of gameplay can help tell that story, I’m pretty interested in trying them out. Given the timing it clearly wasn’t feasible for this game, but I hope Marvel realizes that there are things that there writers have to offer games outside of cutscenes and scripting voice acting.

If you’re interested in the process of video game writing Fraction also talked a little about how that goes down as well:

There was a long process with meetings and talks. It starts with a simple list, a plot list. This happens, then that happens, there’s this mission, then that mission.

The list becomes an outline, the outline becomes a text document, the text document becomes a very long text document, the very long text document becomes almost a screenplay, because they’re broken into scene numbers and things like that. Slowly, an act was building up.

If you want to check it out the whole article can be found here