The following interview is an excerpt from Superhero Spectacular magazine, a print publication from Bauer Publishing that is currently in stores.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: You’ve written in so many different mediums, and I’m wondering what’s distinct about writing for video games.
MARV WOLFMAN: Writing a comic or a novel or animation or television or any of those other media, the writer is in control of everything. They control the pacing, they control what the story is going to be, how it’s going to go. Every element of the story follows through on a very logical and linear basis. When you write a video game, the player is in charge, not the writer. So what you try to do is lead them in certain directions, try to convince them that there are things that are really valuable that they should check. You want to hint at possible solutions, but you don’t want to give it to them because half the reason someone plays the game is they want to figure it out for themselves. If they get a little hint after a few attempts, that may help, but you don’t want to give it to them specifically. So the big difference is that video games are not always linear and you have to write it to keep it entertaining, to keep surprising the player, to add excitement to it, but always remembering that the thing they are doing is playing a game, having fun with the game and you’re sort of guiding them rather than instructing them.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: What point was the game at by the time you became a part of the project?
MARV WOLFMAN: When I first came in, they were still building all of the characters themselves. We worked up several different storylines, several different possibilities and directions we could go in. Video games unlike, say a comic book, where I can ask them to draw an alien race with armies and thousands of people, have technological problems and guides that only allow you to do certain things at certain points. Slowly we took away the complexity of this game we were starting to develop, remembering always that game play has to come first because game play is more important than just telling the most complex story in the world. By simplifying story, we were able to spend more time developing the characters and the story and making it more of a fun game.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: Do you find writing games creatively fulfilling?
MARV WOLFMAN: I actually love writing the games. One of the things that happens when you’re writing comics, which is still my favorite medium to write because it’s mostly me, or television or animation or any of the others, is you get used to following a certain pattern in the way that fiction is told. Video games forces you to rethink what you know, and I found that since I started writing video games, my comics and my novels and my animation have gotten a lot stronger, because it requires you to start thinking all over again; how you start out, how you can lead people in ways visually rather than having to say everything, because comics tell a specific story month in and month out. Here you have one adventure that you have to resolve, but at the same point can’t only be resolved through dialogue. It has to be resolved through the player’s own actions. It requires you rethinking your entire approach, and once you start those brain cells working again, it transfers to the other mediums that you work in. So I actually love doing it, plus I’ve been a player since video games began so I love it on that level, too.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: As someone who has written Green Lantern, what’s your feeling watching all of these aspects of that particular branch of the DC universe coming to life?
MARV WOLFMAN: Green Lantern is one of my two favorite comic book characters, because he has this incredible mythology. Green Lantern may be Hal Jordan as we talk about it, but Green lantern is 3600 members of the Green Lantern Corps, so you have this entire pantheon of characters that all have emotions, you have multiple worlds, you have this incredible set up and he’s fascinating, which is the reason I love writing the comic book. The second time I came to DC, it’s one of the books I requested. To see what I’ve always known and what the Green Lantern fans have always known as a great set up and a great series of characters, actually be exposed to the greater audience now is great. Green Lantern’s universe is so much larger than any other comic book character’s. There’s nobody in comics that has gone to so many different worlds, had so many compatriots and partners and belongs to this huge organization. Usually heroes fight on their own, Green Lantern is part of this entire pantheon of characters. He’s a fascinating character and I’ve loved him since 1958 when the Hal Jordan Green Lantern first appeared.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: As a whole, Green Lantern’s popularity seems to be huge these days. To what do you attribute this?
MARV WOLFMAN: I think the strength of Green lantern is that it can do many kinds of storylines. I happen to love the space storylines, because as a young kid buying that first issue of Showcase and then the Green Lantern comic itself, I was being exposed to stuff I’d never seen before in comics. Superman’s adventures, even though he could go into space at that point, most of them were on Earth. Green Lantern almost immediately went into space, and it was exposing you to all of these great ideas, and as the writers got stronger and stronger, all building off the previous set of writers, we got to see a lot more of the universe, more intriguing concepts. I think that’s one of the great strengths. The other is that he’s part of a group that is really strong. It brings you into an entire universe because even if you say for some reason you’re not in favor of Hal Jordan at this particular moment, you can go off with any of the other 3600 characters that are in this universe, plus all of his Earth friends and villains. So he’s a great, all-encompassing character.