Chris Metzen on writing, inspiration and the gaming industry

PCGamer met with the driving creative force behind the Blizzard franchises - Chris Metzen. In a two-part interview, Chris talks about the process of creating character and worlds, his sources of inspiration, the influence of fatherhood and the current state of the gaming industry.

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Photo by: Blizzard.com

Chris opens the interview with sharing the key to create lasting and intricate characters - it lies in pouring personal experiences and emotions in the process.

- "There are plenty of fantasy worlds – books and games – to get into. But I just felt like we needed to start reaching deeper. Same kind of thing with StarCraft. When you have that well of emotionality to pull from, you find deeper gears within these characters. And that’s where it starts to become art again. You’re not just chasing these contrivances to keep up with every other developer out there with their great characters. I feel there’s a truth in that."

Metzen further explains - in vast - how he got into writing about video games. Starting from his early years of Transformers and G. I. Joe fandom and then the later involvement with other types of media like comic books and D&D, Chris ends at where the roots behind the Blizzard "meta=spaces" indeed lie:

- "I love Marvel comics because it’s this big shared universe where you have all these separate characters and storylines, but they all live in the same town. One month in Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four would jump in. I love the idea that all these people inhabited the same place, but they had their own vectors."

- "I look back on the work I’ve been fortunate enough to do with Blizzard constructing these meta-spaces where a lot of these characters share these universes, but like, the Horde has a very different vector than the Alliance. And you and your friends experience all that as a group. We can go through it together. In some ways, I look at something like World of Warcraft, and it starts to look like a fusion of these TSR worlds I grew up with and a comic book universe – where there are different characters and different factions."

PCGamer and Metzen further discuss fatherhood's influence of Chris' writing, the "rock-star" image he is usually associated with and the state of the video game industry in general.

- "It’s not some uber-bleak transaction, because that’s not the kind of fiction people want to engage with. We’re dealing with a clumsy, goofy media type. Videogames are still finding their voice and rhythm. There are groups out there doing incredible work. We’re definitely finding our voice as an industry."

Read the full two-part interview on PCGamer.com