Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based in their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.

What’s behind (hidden) door number one

Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.

Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.

Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)

“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”

“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.

“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”

The building blocks of a cursed village

Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.

Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them 'story thread templates' and they're at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”

Hidden Door

The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village curse, “you don't know what it is,” Mason said. “You don't know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”

Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.

Safety (and inclusivity) first

We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.

“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one's ever tried that before’ or ‘that's gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.

“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that's not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We're not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”

Hidden Door

The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”

That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they're respected throughout the system,” she said. “There's no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It'll be randomly assigned.”

Go ahead, snoop around

Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes and other forms of mass violence, players can do most anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It's the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.

But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You're discovering new locations that get generated as you're playing these stories and the world grows.”

And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.

“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you're persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”

Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.

“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody's version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.

In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward, or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.

“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That's been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”

16 secret herbs and language models

Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.

We use a variety of models, some of them were building on open source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It's not just one big LLM, it's decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if it can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”

“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that is just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.

This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.

Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)

While the game is designed to be family friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the table top for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.

“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”

Hidden Door

The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and inclusion of story arcs.

There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you're on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don't like you or you don't have the kind of relationship. That is something that's very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”

The future of interactive fandom

“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn't raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out, and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”

“I do think there's a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don't currently have.”

If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.

Following his departure as host of The Daily Show last December, Trevor Noah is partnering with Spotify to launch a podcast, Variety first reported. Weekly episodes of the yet-to-be-named series should feature "in-depth and freewheeling" discussions with influential figures across the globe. 

The announcement came during a conversation between Noah and Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity about connecting with audiences as a creator. Noah said he is excited to "engage in interesting and meaningful conversations with some of the world's most fascinating people. We'll also probably fix every single issue humankind has ever faced so you definitely want to join us for every episode."

Noah credited the ability to record a podcast from anywhere in the world as one of the things that attracted him to the medium. The sentiment reflects part of his reasoning behind leaving The Daily Show after seven years: "I miss learning other languages and going to other countries and putting on shows. I miss just being everywhere, doing everything." 

The news comes only days after Spotify and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex parted ways. The reported $25 million deal led to the creation of a single podcast in three years, Archetypes. Over 12 episodes, Meghan Markle interviewed well-known figures — including Noah — about the stereotypes women face. Unlike Archetypes, which was exclusive to Spotify, Noah's upcoming podcast will be available on other platforms. 

Vimeo is one of the latest companies to launch AI-powered tools of its own, and as you'd expect, they're geared towards making it easier for creators to edit their videos. The video hosting platform says most people "lack the skills, time, or resources to effectively create and edit videos," and these features are meant to eliminate those barriers. 

Perhaps the most useful of the three new AI tools is the text-based video editor that can automatically delete long pauses and parts of the video with filler words, such as "um" and "ah," with just a single click. Users will also be able to easily remove any part of the video they want by searching for certain words in the transcript that the tool generates and then clicking delete. If they want to create short clips for social media, they can search the transcript for a specific word, highlight and right-click on the word, sentence or paragraph, and then select "keep only this."

Vimeo has also launched a script generator that can conjure a full script based on a text prompt written by the user, the intended video length and the "tone" (such as confident, funny or casual) they choose. According to TechCrunch, it's powered by OpenAI's GPT technology, made into a part of the editing suite through its API. Finally, the company has introduced an on-screen teleprompter that can display scripts with the font size and the pacing the user sets. It could help creators stay on script while maintaining eye contact with the camera.

All three tools will be available in July as part of Vimeo's Standard and Pro subscription plans. While users can test them as part of those plans' seven-day trial period, they ultimately have to pay at least $20 a month (when billed annually) to be able to keep using them. 

Vimeo

With a new update, WhatsApp wants to make spam calls less annoying and let users select the optimal privacy settings, the company announced. The first feature, called Silence Unknown Callers, does exactly that — the calls won't ring on your phone, but will appear in your call list, in case the call is important but you have to respond. For most users, that should offer a decent blend of practicality and privacy. 

And speaking of privacy, WhatsApp also introduced a feature called Privacy Checkup. "Selecting ‘Start checkup’ in your Privacy settings will navigate you through multiple privacy layers that strengthen security of your messages, calls, and personal information," the company said. Doing so provides options like "Choose who can contact you," "Control your personal info," "Add more privacy to your chats" and "Add more protection to your account." 

WhatsApp

WhatsApp also released an emotional new video encouraging users to check in on friends they may be concerned about. The company even provides a template: "Hey, I've been thinking about you. I'm here if you need to chat. No one else can see this but us. And you can also turn on disappearing mode or use the chat lock feature." It's a way for WhatsApp to promote key privacy features — chat lock was just introduced last month, for example. It could also be counterprogramming to the notion that chat lock is tailor made for cheaters, as many commenters pointed out when it launched. The new features are now rolling out.

Netflix just dropped the first reveal trailer for the forthcoming 3 Body Problem science fiction series at its Tudum fan event, along with a premiere month of January. This is a short delay for the anticipated series, as it was originally supposed to air this year.

If the name of the show sounds familiar, it’s likely for two reasons. First of all, the showrunners are the former Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with Alexander Woo. Despite the bone-deep hatred among viewers for the final season of HBO’s fantasy epic, Benioff and Weiss are still a known quantity that could draw in some eyeballs.

Secondly, 3 Body Problem is based on a highly successful book series, just like Game of Thrones, only this one is already finished. Let’s hear it for pre-existing endings! The book series, authored by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, is one of the most celebrated sci-fi epics of recent years, so we could be in for something special here.

To that end, Netflix dropped a trailer that’s heavy on eye candy and light on story. That’s okay, though, as those who want spoilers can just read the books. Some of the actors set to star in the series include Benedict Wong (The Martian, Doctor Strange), Eiza González (Baby Driver) and Game of Thrones veterans John Bradley and Liam Cunningham.

January is not that far off, so we don’t have long to wait until we learn all about the titular three bodies and any associated problems. Here’s hoping Benioff and Weiss earn back some goodwill with this show. At any rate, this is a much cooler idea than that weird alt history/slavery thing that the duo almost pushed through at HBO.

Netflix is finally offering a peek at its Squid Game reality show. The streaming service has shared a teaser trailer for Squid Game: The Challenge, a competition series now set to premiere this November. The clip doesn't reveal much of how contestants will participate, but it's evident that Netflix is trying to recreate as much of the original production's atmosphere as possible — right down to the giant "red light, green light" doll. Without the bloodshed, of course.

The 10-episode run has 456 people competing in events both "inspired" by Squid Game and new for the show. The winner receives a large $4.56 million prize, so there's a strong incentive to stick through to the end. Netflix filmed the series earlier this year.

There's no mystery behind the existence of The Challenge: it's a bid to capitalize on the success of Squid Game. The Korean drama remains Netflix's most popular TV show of all time, with over 1.6 billion viewing hours as of June (even Stranger Things season 4 has 'just' over 1.3 billion). Given that Netflix is fond of spinoffs for popular shows, it may have just been a matter of time before the company built on demand for its best-known series.

There isn't as much pressure to release Squid Game: The Challenge as there was upon its announcement in 2022, when Netflix dealt with rare subscriber losses. The company is in a stronger position as of mid-2023 — it added nearly 1.8 million subscribers in the first quarter, and appears to be reaping the rewards of a password sharing crackdown. The firm still faces stiff opposition from rivals like Amazon, Disney and Paramount, however, and a series like this could be key to growing viewership alongside expected blockbusters like 3 Body Problem and the next seasons of Bridgerton and The Witcher.

In the three years since Black Mirror's previous (and somewhat disappointing) season, we've lived through a global pandemic, watched a US president trigger a mob attack on the Capitol, and AI has gone mainstream. We’re barreling towards the future faster than ever, but loneliness remains a key issue in modern life. What better time for Charlie Brooker to bring back his feel-bad series for another season?

In 2019, I argued that Brooker was running out of things to say with the show, despite his deft ability to predict our tech-infused dystopia with Black Mirror's first few seasons. Something was lost with his transition to Netflix, which led to bigger budgets and more notable stars, but less of the sharp insight that made the show so memorable. (At least we got “San Junipero,” though.) Thankfully, a few years away from the project seems to have helped. Season six of Black Mirror, which hit Netflix on June 15th, is the series at its best: Shocking, incisive and often hilarious. It also finds new life by looking back into the past frequently, as well as exploring horror more directly than before.

Minor spoilers ahead of Black Mirror season six.

"Joan is Awful" is the perfect way to kick off the new season – it's the most stereotypical Black Mirror setup. A disaffected big tech HR worker is surprised to find a show on Streamberry (an obvious Netflix stand-in) that recounts her daily life. That includes the cringeworthy layoff of a colleague (and supposed friend), and a therapist appointment where she reveals she's dissatisfied with her fiance.

It's a relatable Millennial malaise setup, the sort of thing Charlie Brooker captured so well early on in the series. Joan, played by Schitt's Creek star Annie Murphy, says she doesn't feel like a main character in her own life, so she coasts through everything on autopilot, almost always taking the easiest and less confrontational option. You'd think that it would be illegal for a network to just recount her life for all of its subscribers — turns out, she should have read the Terms of Service more closely.

I won't spoil where, exactly, that episode goes, or the familiar faces you end up seeing. But as the twists revealed themselves and it reached its inevitable bonkers conclusion, I couldn't help but smile. It was like Charlie Brooker shouting at me through the screen, "Black Mirror is back, baby!"

Netflix

What's truly surprising, though, is that this season of the series also feels refreshing in the ways it veers away from what we expect. "Loch Henry" is a fascinating exploration of our obsession with true crime dramas, and the impact they can have on the people affected by those stories. But aside from the presence of Streamberry as a service thirsty for true crime narratives, the story is more cultural than technology criticism.

Sure, we have more tools than ever to make true crime documentaries – there's a drone being used to make sweeping aerial shots, and the digital cameras are perfectly suited to shooting in dimly lit basements – but the desire to tell and consume these stories is purely human. And when it comes to macabre drama we can't help ourselves.

Black Mirror also gains some fresh perspective by exploring the past — or at least, timelines without smartphones and ubiquitous fast cellular internet. “Beyond the Sea” is an elegant yet brutal story set in 1969, focusing on two astronauts on a deep space mission who also wirelessly control mechanical bodies back on Earth. The episode is less interested in how any of that tech works — just accept the mystery, folks — and more about how it affects those astronauts, their families and society as a whole.

It's not too surprising when deranged hippie cultists appear, believing that mechanoid people are an affront to humanity. Both astronauts, played by Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) and former heartthrob Josh Hartnett, are also trapped by the societal norms of the '60s. They may be world-class astronauts, but they're also men who can't share their feelings properly, who hit their kids to "keep them in line," and who have rigid expectations from the women in their lives. Beyond the Sea may not fully earn its tragic conclusion, but the journey is certainly powerful.

I was surprised to see how much Black Mirror leans into pure horror this season: “Demon 79” is a direct callback to '70s horror films, from its explosive score to its overall aesthetic. The story revolves around an immigrant shoe sales clerk who inadvertently summons a demon, and is tasked with murdering three people to prevent the apocalypse. There isn't a sliver of tech involved — perhaps that’s why the opening credits refer to it as a "Red Mirror" episode. But it's still a fun horror romp, with plenty of subtext around the South Asian experience in '70s London (thanks to co-writer Bisha K. Ali, who also served as the showrunner for Ms. Marvel).

“Mazey Day” also brings Black Mirror into fresh territory, but you're better off discovering how for yourself. I can reveal that its story of a young paparazzi photographer (Zazie Beetz) is a refreshing glimpse of the mid-2000's, filled with then cutting edge tech (the square iPod Shuffle! Dashboard GPS!), but also plenty of old school touches. You still needed big paper map books in that era, because GPS wasn't always reliable. And even though high speed internet was widely available, it wasn't unusual to find people still relying on dial-up in 2005.

It’s impossible for Black Mirror to feel as fresh as it did over a decade ago. Since then, the downsides of Big Tech have become impossible to ignore. But at least now, especially with some extra time to craft these episodes, it seems like Charlie Brooker has found something new to say with the show.

Bonnaroo takes place this weekend and, as with the last two years, you can watch the festival from the comfort of your home on Hulu. Through Sunday, the streaming service is offering two channels of live music coming to you from Manchester, Tennessee. You'll find the streams on the Hulu homepage or by searching for "Bonnaroo."

This year's headliners are Kendrick Lamar, Odesza and Foo Fighters. There are many other notable names on the bill, including Three 6 Mafia, Jenny Lewis, Tyler Childers, Sheryl Crow, My Morning Jacket, Franz Ferdinand, Paramore and Pixies. As things stand, Hulu will show all of those artists' sets except for Lamar's. You can check the platform's website for the up-to-date schedule. Unfortunately, you won't be able to stream the sets on Hulu after the fact — you'll have to tune in live to catch them.

You'll need to be a Hulu subscriber to watch the livestreams, but the service is offering a seven-day trial for new and eligible returning users. Hulu has been the streaming home of Bonnaroo since 2021, when it took over the rights from YouTube. Later this year, you'll be able to watch Lollapalooza and the Austin City Limits Music Festival on the platform as well.

Spotify and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex say they’ve “mutually decided to part ways,” ending a deal for Harry and Meghan to produce podcasts for the company. The agreement, which the two sides reached in 2020, was said to be worth $25 million.

Meghan hosted a podcast called Archetypes. It sought to confront female stereotypes through conversations between Meghan and the likes of Serena Williams and Mariah Carey. The show ran for 12 episodes last year and it was the only podcast that the couple’s Archewell Audio business made for Spotify.

While Spotify and Archewell Audio said they were “proud of the series we made together” and the show won a People’s Choice Award, the former has opted not to renew Archetypes. Meghan is “continuing to develop more content for the Archetypes audience on another platform,” an Archewell spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

The Spotify deal was one of the major commercial agreements Harry and Meghan struck after giving up their royal duties. The couple sought media deals in the hope of becoming financially independent but have seen mixed results. Netflix canceled an animated show created by Meghan before production was complete, but a docuseries on the couple hit the streaming service late last year. Harry & Meghan quickly became one of Netflix’s most-watched documentaries.

Meanwhile, Spotify recently shifted its podcast strategy. Earlier this month, it laid off 200 people from its podcast teams and merged Gimlet Media and Parcast into a new division, Spotify Studios. The company will continue to produce some original podcasts via Spotify Studios and The Ringer. However, it appears to be more focused on expanding deals with high-profile podcasters from around the world (like Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper) and supporting amateur creators in the space through tools such as Anchor.

In early 2021, Night School was in the market for a partnership. The studio’s debut game, Oxenfree, was a breakout success in 2016, and it was followed by Afterparty in 2019 and then 2020’s Next Stop Nowhere, an Apple Arcade exclusive. By 2021, co-founders Sean Krankel and Adam Hines had made deals with the major players in the industry – Xbox, PlayStation, Valve, Nintendo, Apple – and Night School was an acclaimed indie team.

“We were actually talking to Netflix about just bringing some of our existing games over,” Night School co-founder Sean Krankel said at Summer Game Fest, sitting with co-founder Adam Hines and lead developer Bryant Cannon around a small table behind the demo hall.

Krankel said Night School wasn’t in danger of collapsing or laying off any staff in 2021. He and Hines had about 20 employees, they were still dealing with the effects of the pandemic, and they were interested in establishing real stability at the studio. Maybe they’d even find a buyer. They were casually talking with Netflix employee Bill Holmes – whom Krankel described as “the reason why there's a Netflix button on our TV remotes” – about potential publishing deals, nothing more.

“It's like another normal conversation with any first party,” Krankel said. “And then, one day, he literally says, ‘Would you ever be interested in joining?’ And I'm like, hummina hummina – yes. Totally.”

Night School Studio (Twitter)

Night School was the first video game team that Netflix purchased outright, and the deal was announced on September 28th, 2021. This was just two months after Netflix revealed it had hired former EA executive Mike Verdu to lead the company’s formal push into video game publishing and development, with plans to offer titles to subscribers on its streaming platform. Netflix had been messing around with games since 2017, offering mobile experiences and interactive streams based on popular shows like Stranger Things and The Dark Crystal.

Netflix’s first experiment in video games was Stranger Things, a mobile title that landed in October 2017, developed by Texas studio BonusXP. It was well-received and Netflix and BonusXP went on to release a follow-up, Stranger Things 3: The Game, alongside the premiere of the show’s third season in 2019.

If it feels like there was a weird gap between these releases, that’s because there was – but not in the way you might think. Throughout 2018, Telltale Games was building an episodic narrative adventure (as it generally did) based on Stranger Things, signalling the start of a broader partnership with Netflix. At the same time, Telltale tapped Night School to create a companion mobile game set in the world above The Upside Down. Telltale and Night School had collaborated before on the 2016 Mr. Robot mobile title, Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.

As reported by The Verge, Night School began work in January 2018 on a first-person narrative adventure that would feed directly into the wider-platform game, and Krankel and Hines hired four new people for the project. Telltale missed a number of milestone payments to Night School and was generally difficult to communicate with, according to studio members who spoke with The Verge. And then, in September 2018, Telltale effectively shut down. Night School was left floating for a while, until it was clear their game was dead, too. There’s been a Netflix-shaped ghost in Night School’s résumé ever since.

By 2021, Krankel and Hines had seen the best and worst of what publishers had to offer, and Netflix was finally ready to admit its video game ambitions. The Night School team had considered acquisition offers from other companies over the previous few years, but “there was always something off,” Krankel said.

“After the first chat that I had with the executive team [at Netflix] about this next thing, it was so exciting, because they didn't ask me, you know, ‘Are you in the red on this?’ Or, ‘What's going on with that?’ It was more like, ‘What can we do to unblock your team from making your dreams?’”

Hines added, “Our big concern was the autonomy aspect. We’ve all worked at bigger studios before, and have just seen and felt how long it would take to get decisions made, how the creative would kind of get choked out of things because there's too many cooks in the kitchen. But just talking to Netflix a lot before we joined up, we felt really at ease, just like we were talking the same language about how to make games.”

Night School’s latest project is Oxenfree II, a hotly anticipated sequel coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Steam, Switch and mobile devices via Netflix on July 12th. (There’s no drama behind the Xbox exclusion, Krankel said: “Nothing happened honestly; it is just where we are in our development.”)

Night School has expanded its team size and moved into the Netflix offices, and they’re able to fly remote employees in as often as they need. One obvious benefit of the Netflix partnership in Oxenfree II is its inclusion of 32 languages at launch.

“That’s crazy,” Hines said at Summer Game Fest.

Lead developer Bryant Cannon agreed: “Especially for a game with hundreds of thousands of words in it. All that's really exciting. I think the game is going to be better because we have this battery in our back.”

Night School was the first purchase in September 2021, but Netflix today owns six video game studios, including Alphabear developer Spry Fox and two internal teams in California and Finland. Netflix has plans to expand into AAA development and past mobile platforms; it offers more than 50 games in its library right now, and the company plans to add 40 more by the end of 2023.

Netflix is publishing more games than it’s buying outright, including Spiritifarer, Into the Breach, Poinpy and Kentucky Route Zero. One of the biggest names in its pile is Laya’s Horizon, the latest title from Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey studio, Snowman. Laya’s Horizon is a serene wingsuit game set in a sprawling mountainside sandbox, and it’s exclusive to Netflix Games on Android and iOS.

Snowman

Snowman got its start publishing the iOS versions of the Team Alto games in 2015 and 2018, followed by the Apple Arcade timed exclusives Skate City and Where Cards Fall. Snowman developed and released Lucky Luna for Netflix in 2022, followed by Laya’s Horizon this May. Snowman’s games tend to end up on multiple platforms, eventually, but Android has generally been an afterthought. Its last two projects landed on Android and iOS simultaneously because of Netflix.

In April, Snowman founder Ryan Cash told Engadget that the Netflix partnership hadn’t been a barrier for players. Yes, you need a Netflix account to play the games. But:

“Everyone I've had this conversation with has Netflix,” Cash said. “So they just get to playing right away. Whereas before, it was either, I have to sell them a $5 game or I have to tell them, OK, it's free to play, there are ads but you can remove them if you want. Or it's like, you gotta sign up for Apple Arcade, or you need an Xbox or whatever it is. So it's been the most barrier-free way to tell people what I do.”

Laya’s Horizon doesn’t have a currency system, microtransactions, pop-ups or billboards advertising real-life products lining the slopes of its virtual mountain – because Snowman doesn’t need these features for the game to be adequately profitable. The Netflix partnership took care of that aspect, and creative director Jason Medeiros didn’t have to implement monetization in the actual game.

“I didn't want any of that stuff,” Medeiros said. “Because I mean, I liked games before all that stuff happened. So having a platform like Netflix, it's just like, none of that matters. Like, you don't have to do that stuff. It's a breath of fresh air; we jump on opportunities to make games that way.”

When I initially asked the Night School crew why they chose to be bought by Netflix, Krankel immediately got to the heart of the matter and volleyed, “Why not remain independent?” And then he answered his question:

“A small subset of teams are good to go for the next 10 years, but others have these peaks and valleys, and we were somewhere in between. We weren't in danger of anything going sideways. But we were at a spot where we're like, it would be cool to tether to somebody who has a similar vision, and somebody that we could work with that would like, de-risk us.”

Signing up to be acquired by a massive media company comes with its own risks, but they’re different concerns than those of a fully independent operation, which has to manage funding and paying salaries without a safety net. The challenge for indie studios is to sign up with a parent company that can strike a healthy balance between support and autonomy, and Netflix has a proven track record in this space when it comes to film and television. Games are just the next frontier when it comes to streaming entertainment.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!