Little Orpheus (2020)

Creative/Game Director. Story Creation & Script, Narrative Director (including working with Mark Healy/SIDE on casting & voice direction, dialogue editing), design direction, publisher liaison (Apple), Concept Creation and development.

I love this game and I think it’s the best script I’ve ever written. It’s got long old roots. Back in 2016, following Rapture, I pitched the idea of a game to Sony of an astronaut traversing a wormhole, where alien ships from many civilisations have become trapped like flies in amber. I wanted to try and break away from anthropomorphised aliens (that you sort of really need for gameplay) and dive deep into a more Iain M Banks, China Mieville abstraction. It was an exploration thing really, and it had some good ideas but was also pretty abstract and they didn’t go for it. That kind of evolved into an idea called Quadrant Four, about a rescue mission to an enigmatic artifact that appears and disappears every fifty years. Both of these had the idea of a descent at the heart and this went onto something about deep sea exploration (smart readers might spot the kernel of the idea for another game there) and then drilling to the centre of the earth, tunnelling through each lost civilisation in history (Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Shambala etc) along the way.

It was initially conceived as a first-person experience, using the Bioshock dual-wield, one-two-punch rhythm but in a game more about puzzle exploration than combat and was pretty serious. I don’t know at what point Ivan Ivanovich sauntered casually into my head, probably when we were exploring old soviet concepts, but the moment he did, the game just switched into something more fun and comic.

When we were going through acquisition by Sumo, we were invited by Apple to pitch some ideas for the new Arcade streaming service at them. I was playing Inside on mobile at the time and I figured that it was really the world and characters of Orpheus that were the most exciting bit and suggested we re-cut that game as a casual 2D platformer – without the gameplay challenges of Playdead’s stuff and more focus on an episodic, pick-up-and-play title that was more about basking in the world and enjoying the banter between the characters. Apple loved it – even though at the point we were only showing them a few slides of concept art, which goes to show a great concept and pitch can go a long way – and off we went.

I’d not written a comedy before, but absolutely loved it, and Orpheus is probably my favourite script. The voice work by Gunnar Cauthery and Paul Herzberg is brilliant – and director Mark Healy really deserves a shout out there as well. We recorded the whole thing ensemble, with them sitting facing each other across a desk, just like the interrogation scenes in the game, and you can hear them playing off against each other as a result. Doing voice work this way is a bit of a pain for audio as it involves a lot more clean-up, but it’s just better than doing actors separately. It just is.

The other contributor to Orpheus who deserves a mention is Nela Hajec, who took my script, helped me whip it into a suitably “Hollywood authentic” soviet shape and provided all of the translations and voice coached the actors on accents. She did a brilliant job and it was huge fun developing a stockpile of Russian insults to throw at the General.

Alongside the obvious satire on sovietism and the space race, there’s quite a number of references buried in there drawn from Russian mythology which is wonderful and rich. Going deep is something I always tried to do in our games (like the references to the Air Loom in Machine for Pigs, or building the Lakeside Holiday camp in the shape of a Lorenz attractor in Rapture).

Oh lastly, here’s some trivia. In the additional episode “A Rush of Onion to the Head”, the General is replaced by Laika, who is now living with Ivan on his farm. I actually wrote all of Laika’s lines, even though they were then replaced by barking, so the conversation with Ivan would have a proper flow, and Mark read them out to Gunnar in the recording sessions. It also includes one of my favourite ever lines: “My cousin Yelena was struck by lightning once, whilst foolishly balancing on a chicken depot on her farm near the banks of the tranquil Sogozha. Luckily she survived, but in later years would infuriate her husband with her ability to detune his television using the mysterious power of her electrified brain.”