Netflix only promoted Sean Krankel to the role of general manager of the streamers burgeoning “narrative games” division a few weeks ago, so hes still working on his elevator pitch for exactly what “narrative game” means at Netflix. But he knows one thing: After working on the newly released Black Mirror tie-in game Thronglets with the team at Night School Studio, which he co-founded in 2014 and was acquired by Netflix in 2021, the MO of developing new narrative games has unlimited potential.
Night School had bona fides, having developed Oxenfree, Oxenfree 2, Afterparty, and Next Stop Nowhere over the years, but Thronglets marked a radical departure from how Krankel had made games previously. The basis for Thronglets was born directly out of Charlie Brookers script for the season 7 episode “Plaything,” which returns to the fictional game studio Tuckersoft from 2018s interactive special Bandersnatch. In the new installment, a young games journalist previews Thronglets, the new life sim from mad-genius developer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), only to discover the digital critters inside are actually alive. But to tell a worthy follow-up to the interactive Bandersnatch, Brooker had a second idea: He wanted to produce a playable version of Thronglets. Thats where Krankel and Netflixs gaming division stepped in.
Thronglets, the real one, plays like a life simulator from the 90s, but under the surface is a current of Black Mirror-friendly storytelling that was a sweet spot for Night School. Polygon sat down with Krankel before the launch of Black Mirror season 7 and Thronglets, out now on iOS and Android, to talk about the welcome chaos of developing a game in tandem with an episode of TV and how the game forecasts the future for Netflix Games.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
While we see a bunch of Thronglets in the episode, we dont see too much of Walker, the main character, actually playing it. Did the play style evolve as you found that sweet spot between life sim and narrative game?
The most difficult space for us — and again, we were very fortunate that Charlie let us play in this space — was how do we take the abstractions of what were in the episode, of how people were talking to the throng, which — in the episode its because theres a lot of acid involved, and then after that theres, like, bio-interfaces, and its a very strange journey that the humans go on with the throng in the episode. And so we were like, Well, we cant ship the game with acid, so whats our next best thing that we can do?
We came up with more of this terminal interface and treated individual thronglets as a very different thing than speaking to the singular throng. And whereas the individual thronglets were cute little sort of individual pets on their own, this other singular voice was more like the greater good that was learning from us as its parent or best friend or God, as it were.
Once we got that device in place and Charlie agreed to it, that really was what afforded us the opportunity to dive into what I think was so special in the episode, which is about the relationship. Its not necessarily the game. The game is just the mechanism by which the actual episode story takes place. We want the player to have a similar feeling. If we were stuck with just the simple mechanics of feed, bathe, grow, I dont think we could have done that. So we needed a way to be able to talk to the cast.
Managing the thronglets is pure chaos and I was relieved that, unlike in “Plaything,” I could turn the game off and not worry that all those lil guys would die in the interim. But I also could imagine a version of the game thats like that. How did punishment factor into remaining faithful to the episode?
So we debated a lot of that for a while. There were versions of this where the longer you left them, we were killing them off in the background. We tested some versions of that and punishment kept coming up as a thing where were like: Theres a light version of making the player aware of pain and sacrifice, but making them bounce off the game altogether is not something we wanted to do. So we actually pumped the brakes on a lot of that stuff.
At one point, one of our directors, Andy Rohrmann, who has been our composer for years, and hes a co-director on the game, he started referencing that episode of I Love Lucy where theres a chocolate assembly line. [...] That specific episode is how we wanted it to feel, where it was comedically problematic how quickly either theyre replicating, dying, being sad, whatever, but not a kind of thing where youre so frustrated where youre going to put the game down. So we just had to find that balance. And it really is just playtesting — a lot of playtesting — and finding out whats too much and then finding a happy medium.
Does the game connect directly with the episode?
There is a QR code in the episode somewhere. There are other QR codes hidden in materials out in the world right now, and there are more to come. The QR codes continue to unlock some of that BBC-style footage that you see at the beginning of the game. And we were able to work with Charlies creative team on building out some really robust fake documentary stuff with that team and with Asim Chaudhry, who you see in that opening scene. So thats the interplay and it does unlock directly in the game when you find these QR codes in the world. Some are very ARG-ish hidden.
You recently became the head of Narrative Games at Netflix. I know thats a key area for Netflixs strategy going forward, on top of I believe “mainstream” licensed games like Grand Theft Auto, party games, and more kid-friendly games. What is a narrative game? Is the objective to develop more games that link up with shows as closely as Thronglets?
Yeah, it is a squishy area right now, and its one that even yesterday I was sitting in a meeting going, “What are the boundaries of that? What does that look like?” I dont want it to appear just to be branching-dialogue games. And as youve seen with Thronglets, weve found other ways and other player verbs to let people interact with a story. And also for that story to be very directly tied — the game itself is like an artifact from the episode, and so it couldnt live without the episode. But also I think that to me, the underlying ethos for it should be that the player verbs inside of the game are intended to yet to give agency inside of a story.
I think a JRPG, especially a classic one, probably falls into the narrative games vertical. I think the presentation that were familiar with from the Telltales and Supermassives and Dont Nods of the world, that falls into narrative games. I think that what you see with Thronglets falls into narrative games. I think the biggest area that we want to start to look at is: Mobile has been exciting and awesome, and we can do experimental and cool interplay there, but also as we look at games on TV and cloud, I think theres a big opportunity there. So not just for single-player narrative games; there could be multiplayer narrative games. Fundamentally, its: Do the mechanics of the game or does the design of the game serve pushing a story forward or pushing and pulling inside of a story in a compelling way versus the other way around? […]
I think that as we look ahead, the idea of these very bespoke eventized experiences that can happen via the platform and only on the platform are the things that excite me. It means that its hard to templatize stuff. It means its hard to just go, Oh, lets keep doing the same thing over and over again. And the way our teams think about it more is: How would [Disney] Imagineers design a ride? You really have to make sure that its very novel each time coming out of the gate. It has to be a new way to interact with something. It means its going to be harder to do, but hopefully more resonant each time.
