So far, five of the 16 planned episodes of the series have been released. Following the release of the first two episodes, Digiday spoke with the creative team behind the series to learn more about how they factored player decisions and preferences into the series’ real-time narrative. This is a “DC Heroes United” transmedia story.

“DC Heroes United” was the brainchild of Genvid, a company that previously created similar transmedia television series such as “Silent Hill: Ascension,” an adaptation of the video game franchise “Silent Hill” that won Creative Arts Emmy Award earlier this year. With “DC Heroes United,” Genvid is taking a swing at its most prominent adaptation to date, and it took nearly four years for the show to see the light of day after the company originally pitched the DC idea.

One of the ways Genvid was able to get DC Comics on board with the project was by drawing comparisons to DC’s past experiments with transmedia content, such as the infamous “Death in the Family” event, a comic book story in which readers could vote on the fate of the popular character Robin. Batman’s sidekick.

Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid: “When we put them this close four years ago, it was ‘imagine ‘Death in the Family’ but as a whole story.”

Matthew Ball, executive producer of “DC Heroes United”: “We’re trying to push a new format, which means we all work together to figure out how we would adapt the IP, and then we communicate that to the IP licensee and work with them and their team. For ‘DC Heroes United’, coming primarily from a team that wrote in comics or series, we had several consultations with live-action individuals. It’s a lot of collaborative work to communicate our practices and hypotheses.”

Stephan Bugaj, creative director of Genvid and showrunner of “DCHU”: “The reason we thought DC would be great for an interactive streaming series was because if you’re a comic book fan, obviously you’ve heard all these arguments where people say, ‘If the writer did this in the comics, the story would be cooler.” DC, in particular, did the death of Robin where they gave it to the audience. So we both believed in the idea of ​​taking those water cooler conversations and bringing them right into the experience.”

To ensure that fans respond positively to “DC Heroes United’s” take on the DC world, Genvid has enlisted a team of veteran comic writers including Gail Simone, Josh Fialkov, and Brian Buccellato. This writing team spent two years coming up with overarching narrative and character concepts, then handed them off to the creative team at Genvid to figure out the specifics of transmedia storytelling, though writers like Buccellato stayed involved with the story after the concepts were handed off.

For head writer Buccellato, a well-known DC Comics creative who retired from writing popular series such as “The Flash” and “Injustice”, the idea of ​​writing a TV series with a parallel and interconnected mobile game was a new and exciting idea. .

Brian Buccellato, writer of DC Comics and “DC Heroes United”: “As a writer who’s been told that he ruined characters and people’s lives — ‘I’m never going to read The Flash again because of what you did’ — it’s really cool to put the onus back on the users and the fans, so now they can be held accountable when things don’t go their way , as they have So I think it’s probably the funnest idea that came to mind when it was offered to me.”

Core: “We told them, ‘start with a world where we’re at the dawn of superheroes,’ because we need to give the audience representation, and you can’t give them representation if these characters already know who they are. And from there we brought narrative design. Narrative design is driven by our in-house ex-Telltale team [game development studio] people.”

Martin Montgomery, creative director of Genvid and writer of “DCHU”: “One of the key differences between a TV writer’s room and something that’s interactive, especially on the gaming side, is that it’s a team sport. It’s not just, OK, the writers go do their thing and then it’s done. It’s an ongoing, iterative thing where maybe we, the writers, come up with something, and then we present it to Stephan and say, “How would this work as an interactive thing?” So you get the iterative loop that you would have in game design, but that happens around story and narrative design.”

In addition to influencing the narrative of the “DC Heroes United” series, the mobile game itself is actually part of a fictional universe. The series features clips from the game with a frame story explaining that it is a combat simulation used by members of the eponymous superhero team to hone their skills.

While the placement of the game within the show is more of a cameo than an actual plot device, it highlights the unprecedented transmedia approach of “DC Heroes United.” The creators of the show and the game envision a future where fans of both continue to engage with them separately once the story wraps up; however, for now, it seems that many of the game’s users play specifically to influence the show’s narrative, at least according to chatter on social platforms such as Reddit and Twitter.

Chris Schroyer, creative director of Genvid and writer of “DCHU”: “It’s like passing the baton back and forth between two primary disciplines: traditional linear writing and game design or interactive design. Whenever someone holds onto that baton maybe a little too long, that’s when we think, ‘this is getting too much of a gaming experience’ or ‘this is too linear’. It’s good to have these two forces keeping each other in check.’

Bugay: “Players will always try to find a ‘win state’.” So if they think “good” conditions are a win state, they’ll flock to them, whereas if you made a game called “Be Bad,” they’d say, “I’m going to pick every bad point because it has to be a win state.” “

Montgomery: “If you look at an open-world game like ‘Tears of the Kingdom,’ the latest big one [Legend of] You have so much freedom in Zelda and the new gameplay makes for fun stories. To that end, we’re telling it within a linear narrative, so there are a lot of rules about what makes a satisfying story. The trick is to give your audience plenty of room to feel like they’re getting something really exciting, but not so much that they end up driving themselves into a corner?’

So far, player-directed narrative outcomes for “DC Heroes United” have included interpersonal character details, such as whether Superman will reveal his secret identity or the winner of a fight between Superman and Wonder Woman. However, as the narrative evolves, the authors plan to allow the game’s players to make decisions about more impactful events in the narrative. For example, players will eventually learn whether the show’s version of the usually evil character Lex Luthor decides to become a superhero or a supervillain in “DCHU.”

An interesting aspect of the show’s fluid narrative is that at the end of each episode, viewers are shown what the alternative outcomes would have been for the decisions they ultimately did not make. This helps with player decisions for future episodes.

Ball: “Some audience members are understandably skeptical of any ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ because they believe it’s a pre-set rut. Yes, we have some wide shots, but I will tell you that there are big scenes that haven’t been animated, let alone animated, let alone voiced. We’ve caught up with talent who don’t yet know when they’ll be in the studio, let alone what they’ll be playing. A lot of that is yet to come.”

Schroyer: “We have this trio of characters who are super good people who usually or mostly do good things – but how the good things are done is up to them as individuals. So that’s where the interpersonal tension between these characters can exist and flourish and give us an amazing environment to tell really great stories.”

Buccellato: “We don’t have a blank Lex from the very beginning, but we’ve never said he’s morally ambiguous. He’s someone who has a noble cause in his own mind and a lot of resources, so he’s really not that different from Batman, except he doesn’t have such a ghost story, right? So that was one of the main selling points: you have to make a decision. Will Lex end up as a villain or will he be in the Justice League?