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Chet Faliszek has worked on some of the most beloved franchises in video game history. But that comes with the territory if you spend much time at all working at Valve.
Faliszek worked at the Seattle-based hit factory through much of its golden age, writing on Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Episode 2, Portal, Portal 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. But, the series that gives the clearest picture of Faliszek’s ambitions for the new project in the works at Stray Bombay, the studio he co-founded with Kimberly Voll, is Left 4 Dead. Faliszek worked on both entries in the legendary co-op shooter series. In Stray Bombay’s first game, The Anacrusis, Faliszek takes his flair for systemic gameplay, environmental storytelling, and exposition-light conversations to the stars as a crew of unlikely heroes fight alien hordes aboard the titular starship.
We caught up with Faliszek after the game’s debut at the Microsoft + Bethesda E3 conference to chat about the optimism of ‘70s sci-fi, the bright future of co-op games, and beatnik zombies.
BD: The Anacrusis is a fascinating name. As you’ve pointed out in interviews, the anacrusis is the preliminary notes before a piece of music begins. The battles in this game serve a similar function: they’re the first fights between humanity and an alien race before the primary invasion of Earth. What do you find interesting about that moment? The moment before all-out war?
CF: It so rarely gets covered in movies or books, even. But, there’s always somebody who, at that moment, thought that they were giving their all. It’s not that they weren’t doing it for the glory. But, they were getting overrun, they were standing up, they were saying no more, they were just taking that moment, and having their heroic moment that was just not gonna get caught by time because it was happening before anybody was paying attention to that part of the world or what was going on, right? And they just kind of get washed up in it, and you never hear about them or talk about them.
And, when I write for games, I like to talk about not the commander in charge of the space station hurtling off; I’m way more interested in the regular people getting caught up in the things and where they end up and how they got there and what they’re thinking about.
I didn’t want to be like; we’re going to solve this. I think Will Smith did that in I Am Legend, right? Like, “It’s my virus.” It’s like, Nah, come on, man. Whatever. It’s way more relatable, and I think it’s funnier to explore that with characters who are just kind of thrown into the mix. And how are they dealing with it, and what’s going on in the world. And for anybody who’s [reading] this, you should actually read the book, I Am Legend. The book is really good. They’ve never made a good movie about it. They’ve never come near making a good movie about it. They’ve made a bunch of horrible ones. They can’t be zombies; they have to be societal creatures because that’s what it’s about.
BD: They’ve made like three or four movies about it, right? They made The Omega Man, and then there was a previous I Am Legend [I was thinking of 1964’s The Last Man on Earth] as well before the Will Smith movie?
CF: And I will argue that Omega Man is the best one just because it’s so crazy ‘70s weird. Clearly, I like weird, crazy ‘70s stuff. And that movie just goes full-on in on hipster cool where there are just people hanging out outside his living quarters, who are just like [Faliszek snaps rhythmically like he’s at a poetry slam] beatniks but zombie beatniks. It gets weird.
BD: Speaking of the ‘70s, I love the game’s aesthetic, which you’ve said is inspired by late ‘60s and early ‘70s sci-fi. I think of that era of sci-fi as being more optimistic than our current science fiction in a lot of ways, and you’ve said that after the pandemic, you felt like that optimism was needed. How do you express optimism in a shooter? Does the timeline help? That we’re in that crucial moment where at least the character can believe that they could prevent this from happening? Is there hope that they find there?
CF: I always think that no matter what the horrible thing happening to you is, you have some hope. Be it just that you’re gonna go have a nice meal at the end of it or whatever. And, I just like that kind of outlook.
I mean, I think it may come from [the fact] that I’m from Cleveland originally, and I’m a big Cleveland Indians baseball fan and Browns fan. You just expect the worst, and you still go in every season hopeful and happy, and you still go to games. And it’s kind of that in this as well. And we’re going to do some things where there are arcs in the story, and the little characters will have changes that happen to them, and one of those will be that realization that I think everyone also gets when they get older: that eventually I’m gonna be gone and something’s going to happen after this, and I can either do something to make that better or I can just not give a shit and have fun here. And so there’s a little bit of that.
BD: On the subject of the pandemic, I wrote an article early on into the pandemic about how people saw graffiti out in the world that reminded them of the environmental storytelling that you would see in video games. Did you see any of that? Did you see any graffiti that made you think, “This could be in a Left 4 Dead bunker”?
CF: Yeah, I think definitely around when the pandemic met the marches for Black Lives Matter last summer in Seattle, in particular, that had a big impact. And it’s this weird thing where from the outside, the media is like, “Oh, Seattle’s burning.” But in reality, there’s a two-block radius, and then the rest of the city is just going on. We’re all going on with this understanding of this whole weird thing of history happening next to us. And that just generated a lot of that… people trying to express the frustration or the weirdness that was happening there, and I thought that was really interesting. Because eventually, they took away that whole block because they graffitied everything, and there were a lot of people who were just in that transient moment trying to capture what that meant to them and what that felt like.
It was such a hard, complicated thing because you’re like, “We want to be together!” But, when we march, there are actually people handing out masks… As a people, we’re really good at, when there’s trouble, pulling together, then all of a sudden you’re being told, “Don’t pull together,” because maybe that will be the bad thing. For my family, we did not have any contact with anyone else except for those marches that we went to. And that became this place then where I think people were trying to capture that. And there’s a lot of interesting things there.
BD: Did you feel at all vindicated by that graffiti? Because I know that over the years, we’ve seen criticisms of video game graffiti that’s like, “This is so on the nose. Nobody would ever write anything like this.” And then, a month into the pandemic, you’re seeing things that are like, “Cops are the real virus,” or something like that. So, as on the nose, as games writers have ever been, people that are writing this graffiti are matching that energy.
CF: I don’t know if I would say vindicating, but it did make me laugh. I got sent some; somebody had done the “Are we the real monsters?” one. But, I think it may have been, actually, Jay Pinkerton who came up with that one. A lot of why I think those things worked for us when we were writing them was we had three writers that were just essentially trying to [make each other laugh]. So if you said something, someone was going to react to it the way you would react to it if you saw it on a wall. And I think that playfulness and that back-and-forth and not being precious about it is what makes that work because then it’s real. It’s not just staged. I would put something, and it would be overly optimistic or hopeful, and know I’m gonna get crap for that. And that’s how it would really be, and that helps for us, at least in that process.
BD: Did the games you worked on at Valve have a writer’s room quality to them? What was your process for writing then, and what is it like writing on The Anacrusis?
CF: Yes and no. Portal was definitely you sat in a room together. And when I first started working on Portal 2 for the co-op, I had just been diagnosed with cancer, and I was just, like, in a really bad place… I was just really bummed out about that, and really the writer’s room became “Let’s cheer Chet up and make him laugh.” It was this awesome thing of just sitting in there with your friends and every day starting the day by getting cracked up. Like having two of the funniest people I know making me laugh for an hour is an amazing way to start your day, and that does put you in a good mood.
And it’s helpful to have that, but I have come to grips, as I’ve gotten older in life, that I’m less the writer room person and more the mulling person. It’s funny because there’s a really good book [The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved] about the writer’s room of The Simpsons. I always felt guilty and bad about that because Conan led the writer’s room, and the book covers that era. There were some guys who did just go off and then listened to the crowd, and you get feedback, and that kind of process is good. [But for the] actual, of-the-moment writing, I really need to just mull on things.
I was writing yesterday and this morning a little bit because I was trying to fill some things in for the next episode. I’ll just listen to one song over and over, and I have no choice on that song, and sometimes the songs will be songs I wouldn’t normally listen to. It’s a fine song, and I’m not going to knock it, but I’ve been listening all morning to Olivia Rodrigo “good 4 u,” and it’s, like, hooky songs will do it, and it’s got a big hooky part to it that’s just kind of fun, and it’s high energy. And my neighbors have to be like, “Dude really likes odd pop music.’ And so that’s really kind of been my process, I’ll always just go off and kind of grind on that, and so for Left 4 Dead, often it was writing in hotel rooms because we were doing marketing as well as the writing of the game. Often we would have to travel for recording so a lot of the time it was just in a hotel room the night before or probably drinking a little too much beer while I was doing that. Whereas this time, I can be a little more deliberate and just write some stuff out.
My process is: I’m collecting notes forever. I’ll hear a phrase that’s something that I like, and it’ll match the character. Then I’ll play the game as each character. So we’ll have Nessa go through the game, and I’ll just play it as her, and what would her reaction be to this? And you tend to have to play it a couple of times because you have to get into [her head]. She’s not who I am —she’s way more practical — so how would she experience that? And then you go thorough and think, “If I was a player and I’m playing Nessa, what would I expect Nessa to say?” Which is a little bit different.
And then you go through it as a player and [think], “What would I want to hear here? What do I need to hear here?” And it’s that process of just going over and over. And I’ve actually had more time on this game than I’ve had on almost any other game to do the writing, which hopefully is for the better. We’ll see. Maybe it’s for the worse. I hold out hope.
BD: When did you start working on this?
CF: That would be 2018, but then the team came together in 2019. So we’ve been at it for two years, but when I originally pitched this game to Kim [Voll, Stray Bombay’s co-founder] to join me in starting the studio, I had started kind of doing character sketches… Often when I’m thinking about characters or writing casting sheets, I do it by just writing monologues. And so some of those monologues already existed, and that’s where the game name came from, one of those monologues.
BD: What percentage of the writing would you say has been done with you at home since the pandemic started?
CF: Almost all of it now. Just because we were gonna go into the recording studio, and then the pandemic hit, and they shut down all recording. And then we had to wait for a while. And, even now, there’s this whole weird process where it used to be, for something like this, we would do it in two days, and we’d just do back-to-back recording sessions. But we can’t do that anymore. SAG-AFTRA [the union which represents many voice actors and motion capture performers] says we have to clear out the studio between sessions, so that means it’s one day at a time, and then it’s scheduling.
BD: You brought up The Simpsons, and recently there was a great interview with legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder in the New Yorker a few months back where he said that he has two diner booths in his house because he likes writing at diner booths. Do you have anything like that you do at home or rituals you do to get into the process?
CF: So, first of all, he’s in the book. He’s one of the people that doesn’t participate in the writer’s room in the same way and instead delivers full scripts. So that made me feel better. Also, it made me feel better that I wasn’t so psychotic that I needed a full diner to write in. I guess if you can, do it! And the output was really good.
I guess for me, I’ll start playing the game and listening to music, and I’ll try to listen to music that’s just throwing songs up to me, so it’ll be the Discovery thing or the radio station. And one of those songs I’ll just click repeat forever on, and that starts it. And what will often happen for a character is I’ll get one song, and then I’ll come back to it because it helps me get back to that character’s sense. In our case, out of the characters, three of them aren’t who I am. There are little parts of me in all of them, but they’re not who I am. And one of them is me, so that’s an easier character to write for; like Lance, he’s a narcissistic jerk, so that just comes more natural to me and is easier to write. The other ones, I just sometimes need to be listening to music for a little bit to kind of get into that.
BD: You recently told GameSpot that the game delivers the “story episodically instead of just dumping it all at once [which] lets us create cliffhangers and raise questions that pay off in later episodes. Think: HBO series meets Left 4 Dead storytelling spanning multiple seasons.” Are there games that have come out since Left 4 Dead that have influenced the way you’re approaching storytelling on The Anacrusis? And can you talk a bit more about what you mean when you say the story is “episodic”?
CF: Really, it’s a lot of things we had talked about doing at some point or another and then never had the opportunity. Like, one of my pet peeves is games that get written as if they were movies versus games.
So, there are a couple of things we know about games. One, in our case, [players are] going to play it a bunch of times; they’re going to play it more than once. So, you can’t just have one story because you’re going to get bored with it. But, equally, like we saw with Left 4 Dead, if you just give players everything they’ll figure it out. Players are smart, and they’ll be able to piece together information.
So, let’s combine those two things. So, the first time that you play it, you get the, “Hey, we need to go find the communication device because we need it to search for other survivors.” But, the second time you play, you’ll often get mid-conversation of a conversation about something else. And it might be about naming the Brute. That conversation that we used in the trailer is actually a longer conversation. And it’s a way to talk about the world, talk about the characters, and see a little bit.
And one of the things I had been noticing — you see this on TikTok a lot, but also there are some people who make video reviews and streamers — you don’t need to say the whole joke. People know the joke. So, you can just say a reference to the joke or a bit of the joke, and people will still laugh, ‘cause they get it. And so some of the writing is like that. I don’t need to tell you that they’ve been talking for 20 minutes. If I say these two things, you know, “Oh, this argument’s been going on for a while, this is the end of the argument, and we’re just gonna get to it.” And so I wanted to play with that idea of kind of taking those parts of the conversation and bringing them into the game and just kind of always having a flow.
So we have a little bit of intro story as the scene gets set and you’re getting loaded into the game. But, then, in-game, you’re mainly playing, you have some safe room conversations and some conversations about the world, but mainly letting the players not think that “If I start talking, I’m going to talk over the story, I’m gonna miss it.” It’s always built so that it plays a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways in a bunch of different approachable things. So, we wanted to be able to do that, but the idea being, ‘Okay, we’re going to be living with this game for a while, and we want to keep doing episodes, and we want to launch with episodes ready to go.
We’re not spelling everything out. It’s kind of funny. I have people coming from linear media play or talk about it on the team, and it’s like, well hang on, they’re talking about this person Boris, but what’s going on here? And I’m like, yeah, I don’t tell you, ‘cause that’s not how we talk about it. If I talk to you about how hot it is in Seattle this weekend, I’m not going to be like, well, did you know historically — there’s not a bunch of exposition of the moment. So a lot of the writing is that of the moment that you actually have to piece together. And we saw that again and again with players being able to piece together and being really smart and being able to do that. So we wanted to lean into that.
BD: Building on that, you’ve been pitching The Anacrusis as “infinitely replayable.” Your background is primarily as a writer. You worked on stories for games like Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, and the Left 4 Dead games at Valve. What are the challenges and opportunities in writing a story and dialogue that players will experience repeatedly? How do you keep it fresh?
CF: One of the big things, if you’re writing a multiplayer game, is, you have to understand that players are probably not going to be paying attention to every single word you say. You better not have the one thing that you only say once; that’s a super important thing that if they don’t get, they’re not gonna get. So if you look at like Portal 2 co-op, it’s purposely, what she talks about for the actual story there; she talks about it again and again so that by the time you get there, you have an understanding of what’s going on even if you were talking or joking about the level you just completed.
And so you need to be able to make sure you have that space, and so that you’re repeating it multiple times, you’re repeating it from different angles so that it’ll kind of hit in different ways so that they have an understanding of it. And I actually kind of prefer that. Sometimes I do dream of writing single-player games again where I know that they’re paying attention and listening, and I can write this really clever line that they’re only going to hear once that I can be super clever because they’re not going to get sick of it.
But in a multiplayer game, if I write a really clever line, they’re going to hear it 500 times, and no matter how clever it is, they’re going to be like, “Oh god, this is like nails on a chalkboard.” So, with that, one of the things [we knew] going into this more than we did before is making sure that some lines play really infrequently, really rare, so that if you are playing a bunch, you do have those payoffs of sometimes just laughing because you heard something you’ve never heard before. We had somebody the other day in our playtest who has played hundreds of hours, and they asked, “Did you add new lines,” and I’m like, “Yeah, not yet… that’s just a line you just happened to get the combination of things happening and events and people by you to have play.”
BD: Lately, we’ve seen a spike in the number of cooperative survival shooters in the vein of Left 4 Dead after years of not much happening in the genre. Aliens: Fireteam, Rainbow Six Extraction, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Back 4 Blood, and The Anacrusis are just a few of the recent or upcoming games. Why do you think we didn’t see many games like this for so long, and why do you think they’re back in such a big way now?
CF: People finally listening to me?! [laughs] I’ve been saying this for years. I like co-op games. I mean, we have a Discord channel, discord.gg/straybombay, where we play co-op games with the community every week. I just like co-op games. So I’m excited. I love that we’re in the golden age, maybe, of co-op games. It just makes sense. When we originally pitched this 100 years ago, talking to people about games as a social space, they would give us this kind of sly-eyed, like “Really?” And if you’re of a certain age, that is such a non-controversial statement to say that games are a social space that you hang out with your friends in, so it’s been fun to go back now and see people embrace those kinds of games and make these kinds of games. And again, I play them, I love them, so I’m ecstatic.
BD: The enemies in The Anacrusis look pretty different from enemies in other survival shooters, but we still see some of the same classes, like the brute. How much room is there for innovation in the genre’s roster of enemy types? And to what extent does the enemy art drive the enemy functionality?
CF: So, first with that, one of the reasons why as we show the game, we’ve kind of showed it late in its cycle is we didn’t have our concept artists start with the team. Instead, we started with gameplay. We said, what is the gameplay we want. Let’s not create a bunch of models that trap us into something. Let’s just really embrace how we want the gameplay to behave. And so all of our enemies are how do players behave that we want to shape or change their behavior? Some of that is historical because I’ve got a bunch of data from working on these games before, and some of that is new. And so, while the Brute is probably your most atypical big, hey concentrate fire on it, he was a fun one to show in the trailer, but we also picked up some others in there that are very different and very different kinds of behavior in the game. And some of that is like you want to separate the team you want the team to have to change priority, you want the team to have different concerns, you want the team to have to stick together really closely, you want them to pay if they wander off. So you have some enemies that need to be able to down a player or control a player and not have them be able to rescue. I remember there was a point in working on Left 4 Dead; someone came up to me at the office and said, “We’re gonna cut the Hunter, right? Or we’re gonna change up behavior because you have to be able to get out from under it. You can’t be trapped. No one’s gonna like that.” And it’s like, “Okay, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Hunter will always trap you that way because you need to have that, and you need to have that kind of experience. So then we have some of those, but then we have some things that we started talking about because we haven’t talked about all the enemies yet. But like the Spawner is a good example… Really good teams would stick together because they knew the deal. We stick together; even if you get jumped, or you get constrained, we can [help you out] because we’re all close together. So, the Spawner you hear out in the distance, and it’s like, “Okay, there’s some noise, the Spawner’s here, we’ve got to deal with it.”
And what it sends down are these little turrets that will do damage to you. They don’t do a ton of damage, but there are like six of them. So, there’s enough of them that if you’re not paying attention to them, they will take you down. And the Spawner, unlike most enemies in the game, won’t come out and expose itself. It just hides. And it’s hiding in someplace that you can get to. We have a real good understanding of the map, so we understand he’s not spawning in someplace that you can’t get to. But, you’re going to have to go run and go get him. And so it becomes this thing of like… “I’m gonna go after the Spawner.” And we’ll see it again and again, even with good teams, someone splits off and is like, “I’m gonna go get that Spawner.” And they’ll run down the corridor and into the bathroom where the Spawner is hiding, and they’ll kill it, and they’ll feel really good and then realize that they’re 500 feet away from their team, they’re in trouble. There’s another special in between them and their teammates, and they may not get back. And so, it’s creating those kinds of events and those kinds of moments that you feel like a hero one moment and “Oh god, what happened?” next.
BD: Right, and you’ve got the AI Driver that can react to the players and introduce those moments at opportune or inopportune times, depending on how you look at it.
CF: So one of the goals always is to give the players enough information that they can make a plan and then enough randomness that the plan can go horribly wrong. Because those are the funny moments, when you’re like, “Oh my god, Will’s down over there, I’m gonna go help him. I’ll just cut through the shortcut and “Oh, now I got knocked down, and I’m like five flights down, and how am I gonna get out of this?” It’s those moments, right?
The AI Driver is really that thing that you’ll never see in a screenshot and be like, “Man, the AI Driver’s great.” But, you’ll see how the game adapts and plays to you, and you’ll play with somebody else, and it’s like, “Oh my god, this is different, I’m with all my friends who just do nothing but headshot every enemy, and they’re super great twitch players and all of a sudden nothing’s on the path anymore, and I’ve gotta go search in all the side rooms.”
And that’s the AI Driver doing that. It adapts over time in ways that aren’t just, “Let’s send more enemies at you” or “Let’s make the enemies have more health.” It’s more like, “Hey, if you’re a bad team and you’re struggling, let’s not throw enemies behind you because that’s really hard for a team to deal with.” We still may occasionally, just because we want to mix it up. But, having that control and that kind of finesse around the game really makes it different than anything I think most people have played before.
The Anacrusis is coming to Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass, and PC later in 2021.