The first version of the trailer opened on the Ring: a bright band across the night sky, then the Fall. It looked like every other science-fiction trailer, and I had made it, and I knew it the moment I watched it back. The version I am making now opens on a seventeen-year-old apprentice on the night shift, in her own voice, thirteen years later.
Dawn, 15 March 2094. Cinematic art.Her night
The Fall began at 02:17 UTC, which was 05:17 in Port Meridian, the last hour before dawn. Wekesa was seventeen, an apprentice in a Ring maintenance team at the foot of Lift Three. Her team was up in the base station and had sent her down to the yard for a part. That errand saved her. She was found at dawn in the ruins wearing her mentor’s jacket, which he had given her against the cold. She still wears it.
Seventeen minutes past five gives the trailer its line. Once I had that, everything else in the first forty-five seconds fell into place almost by itself: the city at night, the stars beginning to move, the sky coming down, the dawn, the four thousand pages with three hundred of them black. I have rewritten a lot of this game. I have not touched those forty-five seconds since.
The rule I set myself
Real gameplay from about forty-five seconds in, and at least a third of the running time. This one cost me something, because the story is the part I love. But Steam visitors decide fast, and the game sells on handling and on the debris impact, not on cinematics. So the story gets forty-five seconds, and then the game plays. Varga gets one line. Duarte and Hale get one second each. Wekesa gets the first word and the last.
Why her
Because the question the game asks, who owns what falls from the sky, is a question with a person on each side, and hers is the side the sky fell on. The Consortium’s case is a document. The League’s case is a jacket. I wrote that in the margin of the script on the first day and it is still the truest thing in it.