Quantum Break: the game that’s embedded with its own TV series

Video games have long found inspiration in films. The reckless carnage in the Call of Duty franchise, for instance, has regularly been justified as turning a summer blockbuster into something more playable, more interactive.

It goes both ways.

The popularity of digital effects has lent many films a game-like sheen. Critics of the action-first plots of so many superhero films could argue the works often look more fun to play than watch. Think of, say, the cartoonish set pieces of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

But another player has interrupted the love affair between games and film.

Now it’s television, specifically our on-demand, binge-watching age, where many recent games have found motivation. Franchises such as Breaking Bad or Six Feet Under are what designers of the recent Playstation 4 game Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End reference in conversation. Television, after all, shows how singularly focused character and plot development is done over the long haul.

Then there’s the rise in episodic interactive entertainment, driven by the success of the Bay Area’s Telltale Games, whose takes on TV’s The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones feel more like spin-off chapters of the popular series rather than a gamey interpretation. Here, button-pressing often is left solely to conversation choices rather than action. They give players the illusion of crafting a script on the fly.

In fact, the brief attempts at action in Telltale’s games are clunky, indicating that an emotional investment in a character or story is as much fun to toy with as one’s reflexes, the latter being the terrain games have more traditionally focused on. This is largely true too in Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break, the recent Xbox One would-be-summer-blockbuster, which comes with its own live-action television series embedded in the game.