RedBedlam has announced that it will be hosting an exclusive event at BAFTA’s headquarters, 195 Piccadilly in London, on 5th August for generation-hopping shooter Bedlam: a unique creative collaboration which has seen a novel and a video game developed concurrently.
The BAFTA Games Showcase will premiere the brand new trailer for Bedlam, followed by a game demo, then an interview with Christopher Brookmyre, author of the game’s best-selling companion novel. The audience will also have the opportunity to pose questions.
The session will be hosted by Guy Cocker and provide insight into:
- How the project came about from fan email to author and how that then turned into a novel
- The creative process for taking a published novel and turning it into a video game
- The creative process between the writer and game developer to take the game to launch
- Making the decision to introduce a female lead for the video game
- How the book and game industries are working closer together
Afterwards there will be hands-on access to the game for the very first time, followed by a networking drinks reception.
In addition, everyone who attends will be eligible for beta access to the game for £6.99 (usually £12.99).
“This has been a creative process unlike anything I have experienced in almost 20 years of writing fiction,” said Christopher Brookmyre. “It has resulted in a novel that has had grown geeks weeping with nostalgia, and now I’m hoping the game will remind players of all the things that made them fall in love with first-person shooters down the years.”
RedBedlam recently took a step towards redressing the longstanding gender imbalance in the FPS genre by announcing that the lead role in Bedlam will be a new character created specifically for the game.
In Bedlam, players will take on the role of Heather Quinn (aka Athena), a programmer at medical scanning developer Neurosphere who finds herself transported into the world of Starfire: a nineties FPS she remembers from her teen years. Searching for an explanation and a way home, she ventures beyond Starfire to discover a vast realm of interconnected game worlds documenting the evolution of the FPS genre and of video games in general.
Bedlam is adapted from the novel by Christopher Brookmyre, but diverges from the original in this change of protagonist. The novel’s hero, Ross Baker, does feature prominently in the game, but the switch to a female lead – who is a gamer and sci-fi fan – offered a fresh and bitingly humorous new perspective upon the “gameverse” that the player will explore.
For more information on the event and to buy tickets, please visit the BAFTA event page here.
