Amazon’s Prime Video is getting even deeper into the video game adaptation business, Variety reports, as news broke this weekend that the streamer has greenlit a TV series based on 2015 adventure game Life Is Strange. Showrun by Charlie Covell (Kaos, The End Of The F**cking World), the series will adapt the first game in the franchise, developed by Don’t Nod Entertainment and published by Square Enix. The series is being produced by the video game publisher, along with Story Kitchen and LuckyChap, the Barbie production banner that counts Margot Robbie among its founders.
For the unfamiliar: Life Is Strange centers on Max, a young teen photographer who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time. Shockingly (for the teen protagonist of a video game), this superpower does not instantly make her life infinitely easier, on account of her small Oregon hometown being absolutely rife with murderers, dark secrets, and apocalyptic threats. Critically beloved, and with a strong track record of sales, the game spawned several sequels and spin-offs, all loosely predicated on young characters discovering magical abilities laden with writer-friendly metaphoric power.
Meanwhile, we’ll editorialize a bit to note that finally sending Life Is Strange—which has been poked at for adaptation at multiple points over the last decade—into development isn’t necessarily going to help Prime Video beat those “Doing what HBO did two years ago, but cheaper” allegations. (It’s not just that Life Is Strange and The Last Of Us are both narrative video games focused on young teen main characters, mind you: It’s that both games derived a fairly hefty chunk of their initial emotional power from drawing deliberately on the visual language and storytelling techniques of TV and film. Both Naughty Dog and Dontnod were taking big bites as the “playable movie” apple with these early offerings, and it’s been interesting to see their successes then get imported back into the mediums they crib so heavily from.) One key difference, though, is that it’s not clear yet whether any of the writers or designers of the original game will be involved in the TV series this time: Variety‘s write-up of the news quotes Jon Brooke and Lee Singleton from Square Enix, who publishes the series, but doesn’t mention whether any of the Don’t Nod staff who had a direct hand in creating Max’s story will be helping Covell craft the show.
