With Hollywood in its back yard, developer Treyarch has made the most of this infrastructure to bring the cinematic story line of Call of Duty: Black Ops II to life. An exclusive interview with Dave Anthony, game director and writer of Black Ops II.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
How has interactive storytelling evolved from game to game?
We always try to evolve a story with every version of the game that we do. What I set out to do from the start of every one of these games, I want to make it clear what is going to be different about it. It has to evolve, because people will not be satisfied, and rightly so, with doing the same thing over and over again. We have to do different things. I can tell you already that for whatever we do next we will do different again, and we will push this as hard as we can. It’s one of the most exciting things about video games.
How do you see storytelling in games evolving moving forward?
If you look at a medium like film, which has been around for 100 years and so much has been tried and experimented with, there’s only so many things you can do at the end of the day with a medium like that. If you look at video games, which is an industry that has been around for 30 years or so, it’s still in its infancy. I like to use this analogy that I can see what’s happened with movies, where the evolution of movies is like man going to the moon. It’s an incredible achievement, but it’s been done. I look at video games and where they’re going and I compare that to man going to Mars. It’s out there. It’s a frontier. It’s stuff that we haven’t tried and explored. There are so many different things from the storytelling point of view that you can do. I’m really excited about that.
