For the daughter character, Gaynor is also an enthusiast of Booksmart, in which Dever was a lead. “I loved the real feeling of natural humor but the vulnerability that Kaitlyn brought to ,” Gaynor says of Olivia Wilde’s 2019 teen comedy. “I love how Keri can have such an imposing presence, but also has a humanity to her in all the scenes that she’s in,” he recalls. “They are exploring a mystery, there is drama to what might have happened in the past and what they want to resolve by going on this journey - that’s all true - but it matters because it matters to them, and it matters to you, the player, because by being part of this relationship, you care about Opal and Tess and want to see where this journey takes them.”īeing a huge fan of The Americans, Gaynor was keen on casting Russell in Open Roads right from the beginning. This concept is something that Gaynor carried from Gone Home into Open Roads. And if you can understand those people as people, then their story can be important to you as well, and not because you’re saving the world or because the state of the country lies in balance, but because it matters to them.” “In games, especially at that time,” Gaynor explains, “it was pretty rare to play a game just about normal people going through relatively normal stuff, and so what I was hoping to accomplish is to be able to say, everybody’s story is important to them, and it’s not because it’s necessarily the most dramatic story in the world, but it’s because they’re living it. “It came down to what we populated the house with, what the dialogue was that you heard when you found different things,” he continues - all of that was designed to build a sense of understanding and empathy between the player and the story. “Everything really was pointed toward making you as the player feel like you knew the characters as people who you could have known in your real life,” Gaynor says of Fullbright’s first game, which saw the player tasked with uncovering what happened after returning home from overseas and finding her house completely empty with her family absent. The studio, based in Portland, Oregon, is best known for the first-person exploration game Gone Home, which won the BAFTA for best debut game in 2013. “They’re trying to figure out who the family was and what happened to them,” he says, calling it an “exciting, real-world version” of what is at the heart of Fullbright games. “Some people just left one night and never went back,” Gaynor recalls, of the inhabitants of the house. Recalling one in particular, Gaynor brings up the 2001 episode “House on Loon Lake,” which is about kids in the 1970s who visit a vacation town for the summer and find an abandoned house, which they ultimately sneak into. He also mentions the true stories of the podcast This American Life, noting how the tales are told from the real people who are living them. “A really direct, inescapable reference for us has definitely been the film Lady Bird ” says Gaynor, “which does such a beautiful job of depicting a mother-daughter relationship that is far from perfect, but has this underpinning of real care.” This inciting incident sends the pair on a quest through the places Opal and her family had spent summers to see if they can find evidence about what really went on in the past. “There was this man who wasn’t Opal’s father that she was involved with and some sort of scheme that they were going to run away together.” “After she passes away, it’s something that a lot of us have experienced you’re going through your loved one’s possessions and sorting through what’s left, and in Opal and Tessa’s case, they find this stash of hints and clues about this episode in Tessa’s grandma’s life that either of them knew about,” explains Gaynor. Hot on the heels of last month’s announcement that Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever would star in Open Roads from developer Fullbright and publisher Annapurna Interactive, game director Steve Gaynor spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to share his inspirations behind the character and story-driven video game that is currently in production amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic.ĭescribing the game as “a mother-daughter road trip adventure,” Gaynor adds that the two leads, Opal (played by Russell) and Tessa (played by Dever), set out to uncover a generational family mystery involving Tessa’s grandmother.
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