An interview with Co-Director Michel Koch about Life is Strange was conducted by Kinda Funny Games podcast host Greg Miller on January 22, 2016.
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Interview[]
Greg Miller: What's up, everybody? Welcome to Kinda Funny Games Spoilercast for Life is Strange. I'm Greg, and this is Michel. Michel.
Michel Koch: Michel Koch.
Greg Miller: I'm sorry. We're that formal? I thought we were bros.
Michel Koch: Oh, no, no. Sorry, I was thinking that you were asking for my name. I'm sorry.
Greg Miller: Oh, no, I knew your name.
Michel Koch: Maybe you should start again.
Greg Miller: No, we'll leave that in there. This is how Kinda Funny rolls.
Michel Koch: Okay. Sorry, guys.
Greg Miller: We call it "garbage truck on fire". No, hey, thank you for coming through. Give me a handshake there. It's a pleasure.
Michel Koch: Thank you so much.
Greg Miller: We already hugged, don't worry. Everybody knows I'm a hugger. We got the table in the way. Um, you're here to talk about Life is Strange. Now, if the title and what I just said a second ago didn't spoil it for you, this is a spoilercast. You should only watch this if you've beaten Life is Strange. This is not--
Michel Koch: Yeah.
Greg Miller: This is not gonna be like the Steve Gaynor spoilercast for Gone Home, where an hour and fifteen minutes in I spoiled Gone Home. I'm gonna spoil Life is Strange pretty much from the get-go.
Michel Koch: Okay.
Greg Miller: But the first thing I need to do, Michel, is apologize to you.
Michel Koch: Why?
Greg Miller: I feel like I've done you a disservice, sir.
Michel Koch: Why is that?
Greg Miller: I interviewed you at E3. You came on the show, Alexa came on the show, this Ashly girl--I'd never heard of her before, she's never done anything since--came on the show. And we were sitting there, talking about Life is Strange. But I told you I've only played episode one at this point, episode four had just come out. Alexa was shaking me, telling me I had to have played it. But E3 was there, and it was too much, and I didn't get to play it. I finally sat down and played all of Life is Strange.
Michel Koch: Cool.
Greg Miller: Uh, just--Christmas break, right before the new year. And goddamn, was it good. And I usually--I take my--you know, my role in the industry is very small, right? But I get a chance to talk to people and tell them games they should be playing, games they should be caring about. Life is Strange is 100 percent a game everyone should be playing and caring about. And I feel like I did you a disservice by not playing it earlier.
Michel Koch: Oh. Thank you so much for that. And, no, it's cool, it's really cool that you had the chance to play it eventually. And that's great.
Greg Miller: Thank you. It is great. Life is Strange, everybody. Now, but here's what I like about Life is Strange, is, like, right now, people are getting another shot to play it. So it came out, it was digital, but now you got this collector's edition coming out.
Michel Koch: Yeah, and we are really happy to have this. Um, 'cause when we started to work on the game, we knew that it would be digital-only.
Greg Miller: Mm-hmm.
Michel Koch: And we thought that we would never have box ratings. And Square Enix was so happy with the game that they told us that they wanted to make a box version. And even more, that they can make a limited edition, with cool stuff in it. So, I'm really happy that there is a new alternative for new players to discover the game, and even for other players to get the hard book, and the soundtrack, and stuff like that. It's really cool.
Greg Miller: So when you--how long have you been working on Life is Strange?
Michel Koch: Um, it's been quite a long ride, because the real product's runtime was around one year and a half.
Greg Miller: Okay.
Michel Koch: But we started to really work on the game with a really, really small team of three people.
Greg Miller: Mm-hmm.
Michel Koch: When we started to create the concept for the game, it was...like, two--a bit more than two years ago--two years and a half ago.
Greg Miller: Okay.
Michel Koch: Um, so, we had almost one year of mostly just conception phase, not full time, with a really, really small team. Because at the beginning, it was a side project for Dontnod. So, we are not Dontnod, we are an independent studio, working with publishers. But we just finished working on Remember Me with Capcom, and there was ideas to maybe make Remember Me 2 or other big projects. And one of the co-founders of the company came to myself and two other co-workers and proposed us to think about a small, independent game that we could maybe self-publish as a company. And we had mostly--we could mostly do whatever we wanted to do. The only constraint was to somehow use some of the knowledge we had on Remember Me working with time mechanisms.
Greg Miller: Sure.
Michel Koch: You know, if you played Remember Me, you maybe remember those memory remix sequences. And this was the beginning of really, the only constraint we had. Maybe use again this rewind mechanism and try to improve it and use it in the game. So we went down the route and we were a bit on our own for one year. Just walking on our--maybe our love project. Something that we--
Greg Miller: Exactly, when you're working on it, and it's just "try this indie thing, and this love project", did you think it would ever actually come to be?
Michel Koch: Um, we hoped to because we were really passionate about it, and we--something that's interesting is that when we were working on it at the beginning, we never thought about targeting audience, marketing, we just wanted to tell the story and make the game we really were passionate about. Again, that was mostly for us as gamers at first, and for creators, and for us as creators. And we really tried to completely shy away from to what kind of people we should target the game for, what would be the sale. We were really not thinking about that and just thinking about writing this story, making those characters, and creating the game of our dreams. I don't know, something like that.
Greg Miller: That sounds awesome. The game of your dreams, is that how you think of Life is Strange?
Michel Koch: Right now, I think at this point of my career, yes. I think it's really the project I'm most proud of having worked on, for sure.
Greg Miller: And so was it--did the story idea in--like, did you think about, like... Is it the story idea that comes first, or is it the fact that "we have this awesome time manipulation mechanic"?
Michel Koch: It's a bit of both. We had--we knew that we wanted to have the time mechanism, but you can use time mechanism in so many fun projects. It can be an action game, it can be an adventure game, it could be just only a puzzle game with time mechanism. So we really started to brainstorm a lot with that in mind; with the two other people, and with the co-game director--because we have two directors of the game, the other one is Raoul Barbet. And we worked closely with other French writers.
Greg Miller: But you're the only person here, because you're the most important.
Michel Koch: No.
Greg Miller: I can say that, you can't say that. I'm kidding, everybody at home.
Michel Koch: Don't listen to him, that's not true. They will kill me at work if I say that. Um, but we started to really think about what we could do with this, and quite early we knew that we wanted to do an adventure game, more using some of the legacy of the old point-and-click games. I think because we were, you know, in Remember Me, we had the chance to work a lot on the--I was the art director in Remember Me--we worked a lot on the environment, I think we created a really cool universe. And since it was an action game, it was quite fast-paced.
Greg Miller: You're running through those environments. You're running through art.
Michel Koch: Yes, so we had a lot of environmental storytelling, but it was somehow lost with the rhythm. You were rushing the game. So we knew that we wanted to have something where we could maybe take a lot of--where the player could take his time, and where we could use this environmental storytelling to really be a part of the story. And so adventure game, point-and-click adventure game was really the genre for us to start on that. And then we started really to brainstorm about the core idea and characters of the game. There was a lot of different leads, we had some pitch with a male character, we had some pitch with another setting, but I think that the pitch we have right now for Life is Strange was the strongest, because it was really resonating with the time travel mechanism. Because we have all this kind of nostalgia in the game. The high school setting is, for most of the players, is in the past for them, so it goes well with the idea of going back in time. And when you're a teenager, we think that it's still a moment of your life when you're making your decisions that will affect a lot of how you will be later, as an adult.
Greg Miller: There's so many I wish I could rewind.
Michel Koch: Yeah. I think we could--every one of us would want to change things of our teenage years. And, yeah, we also--we are guys in our thirties, so we grew up with American pop culture. There was a lot of influences from that that we really loved, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars. Like The X-Files, like Twin Peaks, or all of these--we started to create this story. And I think it's really a work of working everything at the same time: story, game design, characters, main scenes, and start to build layer by layer, everything, until you find something that's completely cohesive. Because I think that for me, what's most important in the game is to be sincere about something. To have a strong message, a strong point of view, and try to have everything go into that direction, instead of trying to do a bit of everything.
Greg Miller: Sure.
Michel Koch: And so we really tried to focus on nostalgia, time mechanism, and of course this coming-of-age story. Because, really, the main thing of the game is the coming-of-age story of Max. And, yes, starting from that we worked on the secondary characters. We wrote Chloe quite early in the writing, but at the beginning, we didn't have Chloe, we only had Max and this high school setting slowly going down into a more darker scene with adult world. But it wasn't completely working, and when we added the character of Chloe, we knew that we had something that was really, really good. Because we really fell in love with the relationship between those two girls, and we knew that we could use this relationship to really tell the story, talk about the main scene of the game, the fact that you have to make sacrifices to become an adult. To grow up, and to advance in your life, but all the secondary themes we have in the game. All those real-life issues, with domestic violence, and cyber-bullying, and--
Greg Miller: Even more things are just a blended family, right? How do you relate to a stepfather that isn't your father, and you miss your real father?
Michel Koch: Though, yeah, I think it was really a lonesome time when we were just working on that and finding the bricks to build layer by layer this story.
Greg Miller: Well, you talk about the layers and layers of this story. And whenever I talk to a developer, I feel like the thing most say is that by the end they can't tell if it's good or not. They can't tell if it's working or not, because they've just been in it so long. When you're lost with all these layers, do you know or do you even allow yourself to think at any point that you have something special? That you guys are working on something that's gonna resonate with people?
Michel Koch: To be honest, we had doubts, every time, all along the process. Because, you're--like you said, you're never sure it will work, never sure it will reach an audience. Even if we were not really thinking about that, we were not sure--we knew that for us, it was interesting. We were talking about stuff, and characters, and scenes that were important for us. But would it work for others? We had no clue, to be honest. And I think that it was hard, because even when we're talking about the project to even other people in the company, they were really looking at us with big eyes, like, "Okay, you're telling us a story about two girls--"
Greg Miller: "We just did Remember Me, and now we're walking around rooms and looking through scraps of paper and picking up notes."
Michel Koch: Exactly. Like, "You're telling us that you have those two girls who just do a lot of things without a lot of action, and we'll be talking, and talking about their friendship? Are you sure it's interesting?" So, it's harder, on paper, it's hard to sell this kind of project. Because it's quite different.
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