I wrote part of my college thesis in English on Apocalypse Now, the epic Vietnam War film by Francis Ford Coppola. I consider it one of the best films ever made, and I’ve encountered a few other Apocalypse Now geeks over the years. So imagine my surprise when American Zoetrope announced this week that Coppola had finally decided to allow a video game based on the movie, 38 years after the movie came out.
Lawrence Liberty, a video game veteran, is the executive producer of the game and one of a handful of Apocalypse Now enthusiasts who went on a journey up the river to keep this game alive. Coppola felt that the storytelling in games had progressed to the point where a game could do the subject justice, and he wanted to keep the game as an independent project.
So the team launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise $900,000 for the project. It’s not a slam dunk, as Liberty has to keep Coppola happy and give fans what they want as well. He envisions the title as a narrative story that follows the movie, but it will be a horror role-playing game, rather than a Call of Duty style shooter.
I talked to Liberty about the plans to make the game for 2018, the 40th anniversary of the movie. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.
GB: Where is your game studio located? Are you in Los Angeles?
Lawrence Liberty: Right now it’s being run out of the parent office in Hollywood, even though we’re technically a separate company.
GB: How did it all get started?
Liberty: My involvement goes back to 2010. Rob, one of the partners on the game side, was contacted by someone at American Zoetrope in 2008 or 2009 about this idea. They wanted to learn about the game space. It slowly turned into something back in 2010. Monty, another one of the guys involved on the project, and I had our own game studio. We made our first early prototype back then, using the CryEngine to do a rough prototype. After 2011 it went into stasis.
I rejoined the effort in early 2015, but Monty had started putting things together again back in 2013 and 2014. It’s been a long, you could say, labor of love to get it to this point.
GB: Were you interested in doing something with Apocalypse Now in particular?
Liberty: Rob and Monty, two of the three of us, were major Apocalypse Now fans. I’m certainly a Coppola fan, and Apocalypse is in my top 10 movies of all time. I liken it to a dark Wizard of Oz. I always thought we could do some interesting things in the game space with it, so long as we were given the freedom to do something interesting with it. Not just make a Call of Duty in Vietnam.
Young people may not really know the movie, but it’s still had an impact on popular culture. I don’t know many people in America who haven’t heard lines like “terminate with extreme prejudice” or “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” We grabbed…