Inside Until Dawn's 10,000-Page Video Game Script

The horror video game Until Dawn, which released at the end of the August for Playstation 4, is garnering lots of positive reviews and excitement in the community. VICE Gaming calls it the “Sleeper Slasher Hit of the Summer,” and YouTube names it the most-streamed video game of the month on their service. The game is being lauded for its impressive facial motion capture but specific attention is being paid to its sprawling, branching storyline.

The game follows a familiar horror movie conceit: eight friends go to a remote mountain getaway and soon realize they might not be alone. The twist with this game? The story is massive, and every choice a player makes impacts events later on in the game through a mechanic called, appropriately, the “butterfly effect.” So, what does it take to write such a big script? To get an idea, The Creators Project talks to Larry Fessenden, writer, director, actor and head of the indie horror production company Glass Eye Pix who, with writing partner Graham Reznick, crafted the story for Supermassive Games.

“I was interviewed by the company Supermassive because they heard about Glass Eye Pix and the kind of movies we make, and there are some themes in the game that overlap my interests so they asked me to have a meeting,” Fessenden explains. “When it was time to submit a spec script, I called Graham Reznick. Graham and I had been writing scripts together for a while and we really had a good flow. And also Graham was a gamer, and I wanted to bring on somebody who had a sense and a love of the genre. I’d never played a video game before.”