FRENCH ARTIST MICHEL KOCH NEVER suspected that his professional ambition and favorite hobby would, or even could, collide. As a freelance artist, he painted fantastical covers for science fiction and fantasy novels. and illustrated characters and scenes for Fantasy Flight Games's bestselling licensed games based on properties such as Star Wars and Marvel; and Tokkun Studio, an outsourcing house dedicated to creating high-concept artwork for use across entertainment mediums.
When Koch had downtime, he played video games. One day, a client hired him to create artwork not for book covers, but for games. The gig opened his eyes to a career move he'd never imagined. "Since I was a teenager, I'd played a lot of video games, but I never thought I'd work on them. I was more of an artist. I realized that by drawing pictures, I could work on concept art for games."
Koch started fast, drawing concept art used in 2008's Sonic Unleashed, one of Sega's more well-received 3D incarnations of Sonic the Hedgehog. Koch's next job was a labor of love: For years he'd played Eve Online, a persistent online game in which every activity players engage in—from smuggling and trading to dogfights and stealing ships—alters the living world's economy. When CCP Games brought him on to conceptualize characters and environments, he was thrilled.
From 2007 until 2010, Koch hustled as a freelancer. Perusing job advertisements led him to an open position at Dontnod Entertainment, a new startup based in France. What intrigued him was his enthusiasm for one of the company's co-founders, Aleksi Briclot, a prolific artist whose career Koch had followed for years. "He worked on a lot of RPG movies, and he was an illustrator I was a fan of. When I saw that offer, I said, 'Okay, I will try to work with him.'"
Dontnod was founded when Aleksi Briclot and fellow Electronic Arts and Criterion Games alumni Hervé Bonin, Alain Damasio, Oskar Guilbert and Jean-Maxime Moris decided to forge their own path through the industry. The studio opened in May 2008, and operated out of a small office near Paris-Gare de Lyon. Its developers made games using Epic's Unreal engine. Its first original title, which Koch worked on after joining, was Adrift, a story-driven title set in a sci-fi universe. Adrift cast players as Nilin, a rebel whose memory has been wiped by the nefarious Memorize corporation. To dismantle Memorize and regain Nilin's memory, players steal memories and modify others, effectively rewriting history.
Adrift started as an exclusive published by Sony for its PlayStation 3 console. Right away, Dontnod's management butted heads with the console manufacturer over creative decisions. In 2011, Sony cancelled the game due to budget cuts. Dontnod scrambled to secure funding and presented a working slice of Adrift at the 2011 Gamescom trade event in the hopes of attracting a new publisher. Capcom expressed interest, provided Dontnod agreed to rework the game to incorporate more action elements. Dontnod agreed and renamed the project Remember Me.
After nearly two more years of production, Remember Me released in 2013 to mixed reviews. Critics praised its cyberpunk-inspired visual direction and themes, as well its game's soundtrack, world design, and worldbuilding. Other critics were less sold on some of the story beats and combat. One element that garnered almost unanimous praise, however, was Nilin, the protagonist desperate to remember her past. Dontnod brainstormed other genres and settings in which they could continue to build complex characters.
Unfortunately, despite being heavily subsidized, the bottom was falling out from under Dontnod. Following poor sales of Remember Me, French media outlets reported that the company had filed for bankruptcy in 2014. Dontnod disputed the reports and reframed rumors of turbulence in its walls as "judicial reorganization"—evaluating their teams and scaling them for projects of variable size. Part of that process entailed finding a major publisher to finance a game.
That June, Dontnod announced a partnership with Square Enix to develop a digital title. The announcement didn't clarify whether the project would be based on one of Square's established properties such as Tomb Raider (unlikely, considering the success of Crystal Dynamics' semi-recent Tomb Raider reboot), Final Fantasy, or Deus Ex; or whether Dontnod would be given resources to develop a brand-new property.
Internally, Michel Koch had been named co-director of the then-unrevealed project. To his delight, Dontnod would indeed be developing a brand-new property. Koch's partner on the endeavor was Raoul Barbet, a fellow artistic soul with whom he shared much in common. As an engineer in audiovisual design and production, Barbet had worked in Canada on projects unrelated to games. But like Koch, games were a hobby, and one of his favorites was Fahrenheit, an interactive story made by Quantic Dream and published in the States as Indigo Prophecy. "When I played it, I knew I wanted to be part of the games industry. It was quite cinematic, and talked about very important social issues. It was a real shock for me."
Barbet got his foot in the door by seeking employment at a company whose work he was familiar with and appreciated: Quantic Dreams. He was hired to direct motion capture for the actors involved in Heavy Rain, the studio's next cinematic tour de force game, as well as helping to set moods and environments as a scene designer. Afterwards, he joined Dontnod in a similar role on the studio's inaugural project. "Like Michel, the first game I worked on there was Remember Me, which was a very ambitious game for a small studio. In the end, I think the team learned a lot."
Remember Me's developers boiled down what they'd learned to two takeaways. One was that its visual direction was extraordinary. The second was that they knew how to build characters. A narrative-driven game that capitalized on those strengths seemed the logical next step.
That project, conceived under the title What If and rebranded as Life is Strange, was revealed as a five-episode adventure to be published over several months in 2015. "Interactivity is really strong in scenes when you are in charge of characters and in what happens," explains Koch. "I think that's why we love video games. Life is Strange is a narrative game that is, I would say, quite simple from a gameplay point of view, but you can have a lot of emotion due to choices and their consequences."
That notion appealed to Barbet as well. To him, games like Heavy Rain and Remember Me were successors to the point-and-click adventures he'd played as a kid, such as LucasArts' Monkey Island and Sierra's King's Quest. Adventure tropes like finding items to solve puzzles and engaging in long dialogues with characters offered an interactivity that cast players in the lead role of a story. While adventure games had evolved since the '80s and '90s, that central idea of everything—audio, visuals, gameplay, the player-character—serving the story had carried over to contemporary adventures such as Heavy Rain.
What Barbet enjoyed most about working on those projects was building scenes where players talk to characters and solve their puzzles. In the early days of pixels and MIDI music, those scenes had taken up an entire screen. Games such as Heavy Rain and Remember Me handed technical gurus like Barbet a suite of cinematic tools that enabled them rethink how to structure a scene.
"I love telling a story in the pictures I create, and trying to build characters through the environment," Barbet says, "such as the layout of a room and the objects you can find. That was something we wanted to put in the core gameplay of Life is Strange: to let players tell themselves a story by just looking at things, creating threads of narrative in their head."
Koch and Barbet brainstormed story details for Life is Strange with Jean-Luc Cano, Dontnod's writer assigned to the project. In addition to typical concerns such as overarching story and characters, they oversaw the game's technical direction. Koch worked with artists to envision a visual style saturated with colors. Every building, character, and scene in Life is Strange is wrapped in a nostalgic haze complemented by rich autumnal colors. Barbet headed up cinematic concerns such as camera angles to be used in each scene.
Life is Strange was a unique project for Barbet and Koch in one fundamental way. It marked the first time each had shared directorial duties with someone else. As they conjured up ideas, they formed a give-and-take dynamic that enabled each to see to his areas of expertise, while being able to communicate what he thought did or did not work in other areas.
"We try to share a common vision, but we have our specialties," Koch says of how he and Barbet co-led the project. "Raoul was much more involved in camera work and music; I was more involved in the art direction and working on storytelling with our writer."
"When we are disappointed by something, when we think it's not working well, we will tell the other," Barbet adds. "But we trust each other, so we know what we need to work on and let the other do that, and we'll be good. It's good to have [two directors], because, for example, when one of us isn't at the studio, and because there are so many things to think about when creating a game, you have two people [to make decisions]."
