Every evening at 9 p.m., a pay telephone would ring on a avenue nook in Mexico City. If somebody picked up, they’d hear a query:
“Who is the mother of all wisdom?”
If they answered appropriately — “memory” — a automotive would pull up. If they acquired in, a driver would take them on a tour of the metropolis, telling tales about her daughters after they had been younger.
After an preliminary stretch, the passenger would understand they’re touring in circles. The automotive’s radio would rewind and its clock would leap again in time. The passenger would see a lady outdoors on one loop, then see a youthful model of her the subsequent. The passenger would see somebody who resembles the driver on one loop, then discover it was only a model the subsequent.
Eventually, the automotive would shake, the radio quantity would escalate, and an otherworldly character would possess the driver in an all-consuming second, after which the driver would regain consciousness and take the passenger again to the telephone the place they met.
Back on the avenue, the participant would pull out their mobile phone and return to the game that led them there, looking for sources, searching for hidden objects, and making an attempt to discover different portals into this secret world.
Emphasis on “would.” Codenamed “Hamlet,” this theoretical challenge was a collaboration between Niantic, the tech-focused Google spinoff recognized for cellular sensation Pokémon Go, and Punchdrunk, the art-driven immersive theater firm behind risqué Macbeth retelling Sleep No More. The two had grand visions of video games that would fuse theatrical efficiency with fashionable know-how and carry Punchdrunk’s storytelling to the lots, populating the world with actors and wild eventualities.
The two teams introduced plans in 2020 to develop a number of video games collectively, however they by no means acquired the first one out the door. In 2022, they stopped manufacturing on Hamlet and went their separate methods.
To discover out what happened, Polygon spoke to eight workforce members who labored on the game at Niantic, every granted anonymity as a result of they didn’t have permission to talk about it. Polygon additionally interviewed Niantic CEO John Hanke prior to the firm’s current restructuring, former Niantic executives Greg Borrud and Eric Gewirtz, and Punchdrunk founder and creative director Felix Barrett.
People described Hamlet as a uncommon experiment that, at instances, felt magical to play, however one which bumped into real-world issues concerning scale, security, and struggles to mesh the two corporations’ creative visions.
Punchdrunk’s Luddite roots
Twenty years earlier than saying its Niantic partnership, Punchdrunk was a small theatrical startup in London — an “almost deliberately Luddite” one, in accordance to Barrett in a 2014 Wired Business Conference interview. “We were scared of any technology, because we wanted [our work] to be as analog as possible.”
In the early 2000s, the firm made its title embracing the up-close, bodily, and generally uncomfortable experiences individuals can have at a present. At Sleep No More, which debuted in its best-known type in New York in 2011, attendees put on masks, wander freely by means of a six-story lodge, witness a homicide, get trapped in an asylum, and watch a rave-themed orgy.
Punchdrunk developed as an organization over the years, taking over totally different exhibits, divisions, and partnerships — some of them targeted on new know-how. At one level, Barrett stated in the Wired interview, the workforce spent two days on an island in the “middle of nowhere” enjoying cellular video games, researching how their mechanics might apply to Punchdrunk’s work.
Punchdrunk would go on to work on a cellular app known as Silverpoint in 2015, a story match-3 puzzle game with a couple of ranges that performed out reside in London. The app was a small challenge accomplished in collaboration with Absolut, however in the Wired interview Barrett mentioned the potential for one thing larger.
“In this digital age, buying a theater ticket and going to something for three hours feels slightly outdated,” Barrett stated in 2014. “Whereas the model where you subscribe and you pay weekly and you live inside the show for six months, or your life becomes the show, it feels like — what I’m interested in the next tranche of work is that sort of magic hour, the dusk between the fictional and real, where you almost become your own avatar. You become the star of your own film, and you, rather than going into a building or a theater to go into a show, what happens if the show comes to you?”
A collection of experiments
When Niantic introduced its Punchdrunk partnership six years later, the advertising line rang a well-known bell:
“Recently, we’ve asked ourselves: What if we were the lead characters in an epic adventure movie? Our new collaboration with Punchdrunk might be the answer.”
Hamlet was to be a realization of Punchdrunk’s long-held plan. A Punchdrunk present, damaged into items and doled out to gamers over time — on this case, utilizing Niantic’s know-how with a narrative loosely tied to Punchdrunk’s then-upcoming present in London, The Burnt City. The present, which debuted in 2022, is structurally comparable to Sleep No More however based mostly on Greek mythology and the fall of Troy. “Gods and mortals rise for a party at the end of the world,” as Punchdrunk described it.
“The idea was, can we make an experience that has some of that magic of that live theater experience, immersive storytelling, that’s accessible to more people by using devices to expand the reach beyond just a physical installation and actors and a couple hundred people per night?” Hanke informed Polygon.
The idea was unproven, however Niantic was able to take dangers. Thanks partially to Pokémon Go’s success, the studio was on a yearslong procuring spree, buying greater than 10 corporations and signing offers with some of the world’s greatest manufacturers. At the time it introduced the Punchdrunk deal, Niantic had greater than 10 video games in growth.
On Hamlet (which glided by titles akin to “Tracelight” and “The Trust” throughout growth), neither firm rushed into manufacturing. By the time Niantic and Punchdrunk went public with the partnership, they’d been experimenting with concepts for a pair of years. A Niantic workforce in Los Angeles and a Punchdrunk workforce in London ran by means of dozens of ideas and prototypes, making an attempt to work out how a crossover between theater and video games might work. The studios experimented with audio-only gameplay ideas, the place a participant would stick their telephone of their pocket and management the game by strolling, guided by audio of their earbuds based mostly on their GPS coordinates. They additionally performed with releasing a game below the guise of a wellness app known as The Meadow, which gamers would obtain and begin to use earlier than a member of a secret society would break in and ask them for assist, reworking the app right into a game.
One of the essential ideas the groups got here up with was organising interactions with paid actors, letting gamers expertise the kinds of scenes they could come throughout in a Punchdrunk present. The game would direct a participant to a sure location, the place they might stand and await an actor to method and act out a scene for them.
Another concept that gained traction was a card amassing system based mostly on an in-universe spin on tarot playing cards. Team members described it as a geocaching-based game of hide-and-seek: Players would conceal bodily playing cards behind bushes, inside mailboxes, or below benches, then supply hints to direct different gamers towards them. Once these gamers discovered the playing cards, they’d scan and re-hide them.
Over time, these experiments solidified right into a game that used a map comparable to that of Pokémon Go, with varied factors of curiosity and a useful resource known as Tracelight to gather. Actor interactions and the card idea caught round as central options, although the playing cards turned digital objects as a substitute of bodily ones. Niantic deliberate for the game to be the first use case of its Visual Positioning System know-how that may enable gamers to place playing cards in exact places, tying the game to one of the firm’s tech initiatives and one of its steps towards constructing a “real-world metaverse.”
All of these concepts fed right into a story Punchdrunk was piecing collectively, through which gamers had been members of a company known as The Trust. Many of the narrative parts modified over time, however on a fundamental stage, The Trust spent its time investigating a darkish alternate world beneath our personal known as The Lowlands. As gamers collected playing cards and differing types of Tracelight, they may mild up The Lowlands and catch glimpses of the world and characters beneath, with sure actor interactions and huge in-person occasions (akin to performances of The Burnt City) representing stronger connections between the two worlds.
In an inner world-building doc considered by Polygon, Punchdrunk laid out a deep backstory detailing hundreds of years of historical past and a collection of elaborate ideas for the way larger narrative occasions might work, akin to the pay telephone sequence.
In one other instance in the doc, a participant would monitor down a delivery container in a distant desert close to Salt Lake City and meet a safety guard, who would then take them to his mattress in a hidden half of the container and tuck them in, at which level the participant might summon a personality from The Lowlands to obtain a blessing.
In one other, a big group of gamers would collect at an deserted swimming pool in Moscow for a celebration, and actors would pull apart sure Trust members to inform them secrets and techniques about 49 maidens trapped in The Lowlands.
Most of these had been high-concept concepts for the way scenes might look moderately than how scenes really performed out in playtests, which tended to be extra targeted. But throughout exams in London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles over the course of growth, workforce members stated that even the smaller narrative moments proved thrilling.
“I remember testing a part of the game in Los Angeles,” wrote Barrett in an e-mail interview with Polygon. “I had to hand over a covert package to a stranger — a kind of classic spy story trope. It was happening in the real world with a soundtrack playing in my ears. I was driven to this stranger by the app and the game engine. I had never met the person — and suddenly, I arrived at a location and made the handover while the soundtrack got ever more dramatic. The euphoria I felt was incredible.”
Barrett referred to the musical element as “soundtracking your life.”
“I remember as I approached a real location in the game, the soundtrack built and built, and it felt like I was in a film.”
Development challenges
Despite Barrett’s pleasure, a crossover between theater and video games was by no means going to be simple. On a structural stage, the groups wanted to work out not solely how to design the game however how to construct it to work persistently. They additionally wanted to discover the proper steadiness of how gamers would spend their time when not concerned in the huge showpiece moments. People talking for this story listed many challenges distinctive to the idea, with some of the greatest not having clear options.
One main concern was participant security, a consideration in lots of Niantic merchandise. Pokémon Go, as an example, has famously led gamers into visitors and towards a useless physique. Punchdrunk has run into points with conserving its actors secure as effectively — a 2018 BuzzFeed News story reported cases of sexual assault from viewers members at Sleep No More.
For Hamlet, security turned a specific concern due to the sorts of interactions the game would arrange. With gamers performing as members of a secret society, assembly individuals on the avenue, and trying to find hidden objects, there was concern that what made the game distinctive and attention-grabbing additionally made it high-risk.
“Unfortunately, when you make the real world a game, people start treating other people like NPCs,” stated one workforce member. “It gets ugly.”
The groups had varied methods deliberate to preserve gamers and actors secure. Players would stand in particular positions, akin to holding their hand over their coronary heart, to signify they had been members, and actors could be the ones to method gamers moderately than the different approach round. But there would at all times be variables the groups couldn’t account for.
“I think that the experience of playing this game would be really different for different kinds of people,” stated one other workforce member. “You know, it was different for the men who were playing it. It was different for the people of color who were playing it. It was different for the women. A lot of people, even on the team, were sort of raising these red flags of like, ‘Hey, I’m a woman, and I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable just waiting in a spot for someone to come and whisper in my ear.’”
Multiple Niantic workforce members stated that issues typically went effectively whereas Niantic and Punchdrunk had been testing the game. But workforce members apprehensive about what would occur when the corporations wouldn’t have the opportunity to monitor these occasions as intently. And if the corporations swung the design too far towards making it secure, one workforce member stated, they risked submitting off a lot of what made it attention-grabbing.
“There were ways to make it less immersive in the Punchdrunk sense, and sort of really over-index on the safety aspect,” the workforce member stated. “But I think that that would have sort of taken away from the spirit of the Punchdrunk-ness of it all.”
Team members additionally pointed to authorized dangers if issues went unsuitable, in addition to screening and administration challenges for overseeing actors throughout the world.
“Both Niantic and Punchdrunk’s development teams worked closely with experts in trust and safety, focused on safety by design, and leveraged learnings from multiple products built by both companies,” wrote a Niantic spokesperson in response to questions despatched by Polygon. “An internal red team helped test safety scenarios and discover potential risks in order to ensure that the right protections were in place for players. This was done jointly by both Niantic and Punchdrunk, and we indeed had thorough safety playbooks designed to keep our players safe.”
Asked a couple of second the corporations examined the place a participant tracked down a parked automotive, opened the door, and went inside, the Niantic spokesperson wrote that it was solely meant for inner testing, utilized a Niantic worker moving into one other worker’s automotive, was monitored by workers, and “was not part of any actual or intended gameplay for the final product.”
“The number one challenge was always safety,” wrote former normal supervisor of Niantic’s Los Angeles studio Greg Borrud in an e-mail interview with Polygon. “We were always looking for ways to push the limits while still keeping safety at the forefront. We knew we had to test the boundaries to see where they were during development. But we also knew we had to reel things back in as we looked to put a live product out there.”
The begin of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 introduced a brand new layer of security considerations. While the pandemic offered challenges for corporations round the game trade, the majority of these centered round how groups labored behind the scenes. For Niantic — in addition to Punchdrunk and a lot of the theater trade — the challenges prolonged to their output, with the corporations counting on getting individuals out of their houses and interacting with others. In response, Niantic arrange methods for Pokémon Go gamers to play from house, and Punchdrunk delayed the theatrical launch of The Burnt City.
For a challenge like Hamlet, this offered a quantity of questions. Could Niantic and Punchdrunk nonetheless encourage gamers to go outdoors? Could they nonetheless arrange in-person narrative occasions?
“Where with Pokémon Go, you worried about people walking into traffic and trying to get Pokémon while falling off cliffs, we had to worry about that and also the heightened level of sensitivity just being in public,” stated one workforce member.
Hanke stated that on the growth facet, COVID additionally made it tougher to conduct playtests, which slowed progress on the game. “Sometimes you just need to get a bunch of people together and try stuff and be able to iterate quickly, and we were in a mode where it was a lot of pre-planning,” he stated.
Beyond security considerations, Hamlet additionally struggled with scale. The game’s base idea required a roster of educated, paid actors in any metropolis the place the game was working. That would additionally require a workforce to handle these actors and in depth work to adapt the game’s real-world parts to particular places — prices that wouldn’t lower as the game unfold to totally different cities.
“A lot of things were very surprising and interesting and on the spot,” stated a workforce member. “But the amount of overhead and coordination that requires per player would [make for] an incredibly boutique experience that wouldn’t be able to scale to a free-to-play-style product.”
Switching from bodily playing cards to digital playing cards was a step towards making the game simpler to handle in numerous places (although Niantic’s Visual Positioning System introduced its personal prices and challenges), and the groups explored methods of making actor interactions less complicated and cheaper over time, however in contrast to different Niantic video games the place most issues had been automated, Hamlet added an additional layer of prices.
Hanging over many of these challenges had been variations of opinion between Punchdrunk and Niantic. These diverse by individual and over time, however six individuals who spoke for this text stated the corporations typically clashed whereas engaged on Hamlet, noting that the two by no means absolutely acquired on the identical web page, which they stated slowed progress on the game.
Conceptually, Hamlet was supposed to mix Punchdrunk’s experiential concepts with Niantic’s game design information, however the six individuals stated discovering frequent floor between these two proved tough, with Punchdrunk getting pissed off that its concepts had been watered down or not taken, and Niantic getting pissed off over Punchdrunk’s lack of game growth expertise and frequent iteration. Four Niantic workforce members stated Punchdrunk was nice at dreaming up huge concepts for when every little thing performed out the approach it was supposed to, however didn’t at all times have solutions for what to do when issues didn’t go in accordance to plan.
“Setting a mood is not the same as making a thing where you have to do things, and you’re building up and there’s choices and there’s a story,” stated one Niantic workforce member. “[…] So trying to do something that is Niantic-like, that goes on forever, that has a game-like element, was not in their wheelhouse.”
The workforce members additionally pointed to philosophical variations between the corporations, noting that Punchdrunk pushed to make issues extra dangerous and uncomfortable, whereas Niantic tended to be extra technical and sensible.
“I think part of the Punchdrunk formula was very much wanting to push people outside their comfort zones,” stated a Niantic workforce member. “And that was sort of the experience that they wanted, which didn’t entirely line up with the experience that Niantic wanted, which eventually became more like, ‘We want this to be available for everyone.’ And that sort of became a difficult design tradeoff where the more you make it accessible for everyone, the less you can push people outside of their comfort zones.”
Borrud described the variations as “a natural tension between what was a game and what was a performance.” Borrud, Hanke, and Barrett all pointed to the bodily distance between the London and Los Angeles places of work as a key barrier for a challenge that required in depth artistic collaboration and in-person testing.
“With something this experimental I think we would have been better served by having the entire team all under one roof,” wrote Borrud.
“When we were in the room together the creative sparks flew,” wrote Barrett, “but having to be mainly online with an eight-hour time difference made everything slower and more difficult.”
The closing months
By early 2022, regardless of greater than three years of work, former Niantic head of growth of video games Eric Gewirtz described the game as nonetheless being in preproduction.
Niantic and Punchdrunk had taken a quantity of steps to overcome the varied challenges, bringing in a workforce from Niantic’s London workplace (which addressed some of the time zone points), growing a set of moderation instruments (which addressed some of the security considerations), and including kinds of digital storytelling, like prerecorded audio clips, robotic calls, and a web based ARG (which addressed some of the scale challenges). The groups additionally continued to iterate on the design and pulled again on some of the game’s extra formidable narrative parts, however they hadn’t gotten to a spot the place everybody concerned was assured in what that they had, and they hadn’t produced loads of content material past an preliminary onboarding sequence.
Niantic and Punchdrunk had been working towards debuting the game in London, with plans to roll out in different places like New York and Los Angeles later. During inner testing, some of which came about round procuring district Covent Garden, the workers ran gamers by means of totally different sequences, akin to an onboarding sequence the place the game would name gamers and ask them a collection of questions.
“Where I think we hadn’t quite found the secret sauce and the magic yet was in the moment-to-moment gameplay,” Gewirtz stated. “There were these really epic, magical experiences that would happen that were kind of charted out, but in between [during] the hours of gameplay, it was challenging to keep the players engaged and occupied.”
Some workforce members had been additionally involved that, years into growth, sure questions of safety hadn’t been resolved, referencing discussions like whether or not actors would have entry to participant telephone numbers (finally, they might not) or how intently actors would have been ready to monitor particular person participant actions.
The groups had arrange a quantity of safeguards to log communications between gamers and actors and constructed a suggestions system to enable gamers to report uncommon or inappropriate conduct, with Niantic’s belief and security and authorized groups concerned in the course of. Players would even have had to agree to phrases and circumstances saying they had been of age (“we knew this would always be an adults-only game,” wrote Borrud) and they might have had choices to flip off sure facets of the game, akin to having the ability to obtain calls. But some workforce members remained nervous that they couldn’t anticipate each situation.
At one level when testing the game in London, Gewirtz was trying to find an actor in the center of the day when the game directed him down an alley. As he began strolling in that route, he found a lady defecating in entrance of him.
“I was like, OK, I think I’m going to go down a different alley,” he stated.
The story turned a well-liked anecdote amongst the Niantic workers, getting handed round and twisted like an city legend.
“It was just funny that it happened to me because I was really in the moment right there,” Gewirtz stated. “I was listening to the audio. I was really kind of getting immersed in the quest, in the adventure, and that really just pulled me out of it.”
“It was a stark reminder that there are things we can control and things we can’t control when you have any type of thing happening in the real world,” wrote Borrud. “Even a place as controlled as Disneyland has things they can’t control when it comes to guest behavior. I don’t have a good solve for those variables yet. But it was something we talked about quite a bit and was a reason we started to move the core gameplay closer to known ‘Points of Interest’ and tailor the initial experience to a specific neighborhood that we knew intimately. Ultimately, though, we also had to acknowledge that there was no way we would be able to control the real world.”
Calling Hamlet off
On June 29, 2022, Bloomberg reported that Niantic had stopped manufacturing on Hamlet together with three different tasks, chopping roughly 85 to 90 jobs, or about 8% of the firm. The information adopted Niantic’s wrestle to diversify its portfolio past Pokémon Go, with video games akin to Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Catan: World Explorers underperforming, in addition to its March 2022 acquisition of AR instruments firm eighth Wall, which Niantic known as its “largest acquisition to date.”
According to Hanke, Niantic stopped manufacturing on Hamlet as a result of it didn’t see a approach to make the math work when hiring actors and customizing the game to a number of places for a large launch.
“We were still struggling to achieve our vision for the product, or bringing that excitement of live immersive theater into a broader setting,” stated Hanke. “And when we looked at the numbers of the way that we got there, the way that we got where we did was going to be really expensive, and it was going to be something that we were going to have a hard time doing outside of very specific kinds of cities.”
“We got an experience in London that we were reasonably happy with that did some interesting things,” stated Hanke. “[…] I think I would’ve been happy to launch it in London, save for the fact that we just didn’t have a plan to expand it beyond London that made financial sense.”
Prior to shutting down the challenge, Niantic went by means of in depth discussions about how to monetize it, wanting into releasing it as a free-to-play game, a premium game, a subscription game, an app tied to tickets to The Burnt City, or a game that includes paid avenue performances. But the game’s distinctive parts offered heavy upfront prices.
Six builders stated they weren’t stunned that Niantic and Punchdrunk moved on from Hamlet, saying it at all times felt like a pet challenge or one thing the corporations had been doing for status or to attain into different markets, moderately than a straight try to make a revenue.
Multiple workforce members additionally talked about that Punchdrunk was hit significantly exhausting by COVID and its lingering results on the theater enterprise.
“Punchdrunk […] were really pushed to the limit to get their play done and launched, coming out of COVID,” stated Hanke. “It was very, very challenging for them. So there were kind of bandwidth constraints on their side that kind of made things extra challenging. So when we wound it down, they were able to really just focus on getting the play done, which was — obviously that was the existential thing for them that had to happen.”
“The truth is that two years of working at distance with all the restrictions of COVID took some of the momentum out of it all,” wrote Barrett. “It meant we couldn’t travel literally and figuratively as far as we wanted to.”
Staff additionally heard combined messages on the game’s launch date. An early plan to launch the game alongside The Burnt City hadn’t labored out, and as time went on Hamlet bumped into a number of inner delays. One Niantic workforce member stated that, simply earlier than the game acquired lower, they heard it was supposed to be two weeks out from launch, which they known as a “pipe dream.”
“I mean, it never would have been finished, is kind of my take on it,” stated one other Niantic workforce member.
Borrud estimated that, by mid-2022, the groups had been 4 to six months away from having the ability to usher in an preliminary small batch of public gamers, although he added it’s “hard to really say if we would have been ready for that initial cohort.”
“We were ready to try to get there and evaluate along the way,” he wrote.
Moving on
On June 29, Niantic introduced one other spherical of layoffs, this time closing the Los Angeles studio the place the majority of Hamlet had been constructed and chopping roughly 230 jobs, or about 25% of the firm.
In a press release, Hanke laid out varied challenges going through Niantic, akin to a crowded cellular market and adjustments to the cellular promoting trade, noting that workers ought to “expect a more direct and results-based culture” going ahead. As half of a shift in route, he wrote that Niantic could be scaling again spending on cellular game investments in favor of supporting present video games, akin to Pokémon Go, and specializing in know-how and content material for mixed-reality {hardware} and the future of augmented-reality glasses.
A number of months later, on Sept. 24, Punchdrunk held The Burnt City’s closing efficiency in London. In a press release launched alongside the announcement of that efficiency, Barrett wrote that the present “has propelled us forwards and we want to keep that momentum,” including that Punchdrunk will use the identical location as a long-term house for different tasks. “We’re fairly sure that The Burnt City will be the last new mask show the company makes, and what comes next will be different and unlike anything we have done before,” he wrote.
On Nov. 8, Punchdrunk introduced that Sleep No More’s New York run will finish in January 2024.
Speaking prior to Niantic’s directional shift, Hanke stated that he hopes Niantic can return to a challenge like Hamlet in the future, noting that current advances in synthetic intelligence might scale back the working prices by serving to customise the game to totally different places or changing reside actors with digital ones.
Barrett agreed AI would have helped Hamlet scale extra affordably, although he was much less obsessed with the prospect. “Sad to say but it is probably true,” he wrote. “I am very resistant to the idea of AI replacing actors and people, however, there is no doubt that some of the time we spent trying to [automate messages], for example, AI would have helped us solve much faster.”
Barrett wrote that Punchdrunk will “absolutely” return to a reside video game idea like this in the future. “To my mind, still, no one has created a major crossover video game/theatrical project,” he stated. “We truly believe that is the future of shows. We see it in audiences, especially younger ones who have grown up with video games and it feels inevitable that this future is coming.”
“I loved the idea,” stated Hanke. “I cherished the expertise of constructing it. It was heartbreaking that it finally didn’t work out as a challenge that we might proceed to put money into. I hope we’re ready to come again to the idea. […]
“I think it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen, but there are definitely some unique challenges there.”
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