Whether it’s a hit TV show like HBO’s “The Last of Us” or an interactive theme park land like Universal Studios’ Super Nintendo World, video games are ripe for adaptation and reinterpretation.With “Ashfall,” Liithos CEO and founder Michael Mumbauer and VP of creative John Garvin are banking on their characters and immersive world being strong enough to draw fans before any game-play.
“For my last game, I literally wrote about 12,000 pages of script,” says Garvin. “That’s like the equivalent of 10 two-hour movies, and that’s really what you need to fill up a game. You need lots of the same thing you need in any medium — plot, character development, theme. You’ve got to have something important to say.”
Mumbauer says he’s invested in exploring new storytelling platforms. A video game and film industry veteran, he and his team brought to life popular characters like Nathan Drake from “Uncharted” and Joel and Ellie from “The Last of Us.” After working for PlayStation for 13 years, he knows the game world and how to get players to connect. Now, the challenge is how to make that happen without having an actual game to play.The first episode of the TikTok series “Ashfall,” starring Michael Le.
“I think it was experimental and we were already writing the comic book,” Mumbauer says. “It felt like the natural way to position the comic adjacent to this because the game is gonna take years. So it felt like, ‘What if we try to build this IP slightly in reverse. Even though we have a gaming background, what if we didn’t start with gaming, but we landed on it?’”
TikTok series “Ashfall” has drawn more than 10 million views so far, before the last chapter drops on Sunday.
CCP tools.