While that version of the film was ultimately cancelled because of the pandemic, the documentary, now screening at film festivals across Europe, retains a dual-screen format. The film was initially intended to be a multi-channel installation at Now Play This, a video game festival in London – two screens projected within a single space. “I think you gain something by not knowing how they’re made.” It’s like they’re made by elves,” Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser told GQ. It is at odds with Rockstar’s desire to preserve the aura of mystique around its making. The documentary, directed by Marie Foulston, who curated the V&A’s video game exhibition Design/Play/Disrupt, shows how this ethereal low-res landscape of half-finished objects could have become the exceptionally well-crafted video game Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately is. ‘No this isn’t broken’ … Still from The Grannies. It was actually more work to delete them.” “Then it went through this iterative process of becoming more and more refined, but they never bothered to get rid of those extra bits. “As the game was coming together, maybe they generated this big landscape,” he suggests. Maclarty speculates that the out-of-bounds space they were exploring was, in fact, a deliberate part of Rockstar’s creative process rather than any kind of mistake.
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“Often you see players commenting, ‘Oh, it’s a glitch, it’s broken, they didn’t do a good job.’ But because of our experience, we were able to see that, no this isn’t broken, this is perhaps the foundation of how the full game was made.”
“Part of the benefit of understanding how games are made is that we didn’t instantly reject it,” she says. Quigley thinks this is why they found the space so engaging beyond its aesthetic peculiarities. At various points, gigantic polygonal objects rose out of the virtual turf like the black monolith of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: eerie, bizarre, bewitching.įor the Grannies, all of whom are independent game-makers, this was a rare opportunity to “peek behind the curtain” of the secretive world of corporate game production. The north-east was filled with snow, glaciers, wolves and elk, and venturing farther west revealed a pine forest. In the south-east, a gloomy, sparse landscape of jutting mountains, and beyond that, recalls Bartlett, an “endless, unlit valley”. Cautiously, unsure of how the terrain actually functioned, the foursome uncovered a place of sheer virtual otherness. Bartlett describes the first moments within it as “spine-tingling”. MacLarty emphasises the vast scale of the out-of-bounds area, which is “way bigger than the main map”, he says. This journey is memorialised in a new travelogue-esque documentary titled The Grannies.