It was less than two months ago, when I was thinking about the future of this „brand“. I did a market research about what was currently a small market trend on DriveThruRPG and itch.io and somehow found this game Void 1680 AM. After a small playthrough with it, I fell in love with the idea of taking things we’re interacting and consuming and look through the lens of what it actually meant to us and what memories we associate with it. With Void 1680 AM it was with music songs. In my playthrough I had memories of my uncle doing his own radio show that would run once every few months, and I thought… that could be applied to movies, too, right? How should I take this idea and make it my own? To this end, I remembered two things in the past:
- Creating a movie seminar series as part of a university course and in cooperation with a local movie theatre
- Writing a screenplay for Star Trek: Voyager in the late 90s
I started writing the core idea with the seminar series in mind. Back in 2008, I worked with a professor for Artificial Intelligence together to have a movie series that are centered on Artificial Intelligence. We worked out a cooperation with a local cinema named Kino Achteinhalb, got some sponsors, designed some posters. During that summer I watched through lots of different movies of the genre and compiled an early list of movies that we could show. We had classics like Terminator 2, Blade Runner or 2001 – A Space Odyssey on our list, but also newer movies like Minority Report or Wall-E. Some movies had to be pulled from the list because it was difficult to get the presentation rights or find an appropriate film role we could show (that was before everything went digital a few years later). For example Blade Runner… no one knew who had the rights to show the movie in cinemas at that time. We wanted to show Star Trek – The Motion Picture or First Contact and they were off-limits because Paramount blocked every Star Trek movie to boost anticipation for their 2009 movie. Lucasfilm blocked showing Star Wars in small theatres, because they wanted it to be shown on a larger screen for a better experience. But 2001 was a better experience, when we got an admission to show it from Kubrick’s estate (or someone who had the rights at that time). So, that was incredibly enlightening just as a background for those kind of festival or movie series. And then there was also the idea to have every movie begin with a 15 min presentation up-front. For 12 movies, I had a few presentations that I did myself, for example I did a presentation about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics before showing I, Robot with Will Smith or another presentation about How to survive the RobotApocalypse before Terminator II. Yeah, I was young and naive.
That became the backbone of the game. Standing in front of an audience, talking about the movie you’re about to see and tie it into the core theme of the movie series. That is the core base of this game. Void 1680 AM has it surrounded by a radio show, Reel To Real brings you into a speaker role. With Void you’re creating a playlist with songs you’ve had strong memories with, that you like and love, while Reel To Real lets you think about the movies you’ve seen and watched in the past. During some of the playthroughs, I had some prompts that had me thinking, what could be a movie that’s
- Dark, heavy, introspective
- A movie that’s not part of a franchise
- a movie about Artificial intelligence
… and you’d think about movies like Minority Report again. And yeah, I’ve rewatched it recently after this playthrough and it still has an edge to it, which I think has been mostly forgotten over the years, while we are talking about using pre-crime detection software like Palantir today… and see… these are some of the ideas that you’d use for your own movies, like thinking about the movie when you saw it first versus how you would see it today.
The second thing that I came up with was the idea to write it as a screenplay. Back in the late 1990s, I heard about that Star Trek writers program where they would allow scripts to be sent in by amateurs. And even back then, when I was 16 or 17, I was already heavy into Trek. Around Season Five of Voyager, I was thinking I could my own story and named it „Black Hole Sun“. It was mainly based around that species from TNG’s Season One episode Conspiracy and dealt with Voyager finding the main planet of this species (It’s funny that I’m currently running a Star Trek Adventures game and this initial starter set has also a story about the same species). At that time, I bought a screenplay from Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan and had its screenplay design be my inspiration for the layout and presentation. Couple of weeks ago, I found myself in the attic and … you might guess it… I found that Wrath of Khan script once again and took it downstairs and here we are, being in inspiration once again after all those years.
So, these were my two building blocks: The festival idea and the screenplay idea. Then it was just figuring out the story of the manual, what gameplay beats should be explained in more detail and how to place it in the layout. In the beginning, I had most of the tables ready, but was thinking I could have more prompts. I had a similar cardset + six-sided dice gameplay loop in my previous game The Dream Date, but there I had separated the cards by suit for the different steps of the date. In the end it’s a numbers game, so I took the suit of a card for the general mood of the movie and have it separated into four core mood types. In a normal game (whey you’d take just the card value) you’d have 4*13=52 combinations, here you’d have 6*14=84 possible combination prompts if you’re also considering the Joker cards too). To get a bit of flavor in, I also took the idea of audience questions from Void, but instead of callers, it’s audience members. And you know from conventions or discussion rounds that there are some members who would have multiple questions and participate the most, so there are also options to customize those characters in the audience and have a little arc for them for the course of the festival again. And that’s basically it. After three to four weeks I had a first finished prototype, and promoted it on Bluesky and Threads and there was a response who wanted to give it a try… and yeah, they gave valuable insight and I reordered chapter three after their playthrough, noting that I had the tables too late in that chapter in that early draft and in this version it’s much sooner, so you’d have less of a walk-back situation. And even if you don’t want to read through this script, there’s still the other document that’s just the tables, without any extra fluff.
And that’s basically the behind-the-scenes of the game. And to make it a much easier experience, I’ve decided to make if a Pay What You Want article on both itch.io and DriveThruRPG. I don’t have that big of an audience so far. Maybe that can be changed with some word-of-mouth, if someone likes this game and shares it with their friends. Because overall the main core of the game is the sense of community when you go out to the movies. It’s experiencing it together with a large group of people. Sometimes something goes wrong. But in the end, once the movie is done, there’s a lot to discuss afterwards. This is what I wanted to achieve this game, to bring discussion back about movies and the love for movies. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I had writing it…
You can find it on: