If you’ve ever wondered what it’d be like to live in the dystopian world of Animal Farm, wonder no longer. Soon, gamers will be able to explore Manor Farm firsthand as one of George Orwell’s iconic characters.
George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, Animal Farm, will soon be adapted into an indie video game thanks to Orwell’s estate. With the increase of dystopian movies and books finding popularity and relevancy in the modern world today, what better way to celebrate this resurgence of the genre than to bring back Orwell’s masterpiece, which began the genre in the first place.
A large team of video game experts will be contributing to the production of the Animal Farm adaptation. In an email to the technology website Engadget, one of the team members, Imre Jele, stated, “Our motley crew of multi-award winning game creators came together from various companies to create this one game together.” The creators behind the new indie game include George Baker, Kate Saxon, Jessica Curry, and Andy Payne, all of whom took part in making popular games such as I AM Bread, Fable, The Witcher 3, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and Gambitious.
While the game has only just begun production, Jele states he’s had the idea to adapt Animal Farm into a video game for years. Jele confessed that once they started getting the project up and running, he used some of his old game design notes that he wrote as far back as the 1990s.
The game will feature two gameplay options as Napolean and his fellow animals revolt against Mr. Jones and form their own leadership that steadily transmogrifies from equality to communism. The first option will be an adventure game, where gamers will play as one of the oppressed farm animals under Napolean’s regime. The second gameplay experience will be ”tycoon-esque” and have gamers playing the role of the oppressor, making the difficult choices that come with running the farm.
According to Jele, “it’s particularly important for the readers and players to be able to identify with both oppressors and the oppressed.” The video game won’t only be about the journey of the farm animals like Boxer, “but also about the everyday choices Napolean and the other animals make to run the farm,” continued Jele. “There are pivotal moments of history hidden in the mundane.”
When describing the gameplay for the upcoming title, Jele stated, “Our story and play mechanics will be about our deeply rooted, collective desires for liberty, equality, and fraternity that are overshadowed by the absolute corruptive effect of power over individuals,” making the game thoroughly connected to the original novel’s themes.
With the increase of recent political unrest, Orwell’s novel is seeming more and more applicable to our modern world, making it an opportune time to adapt the anti-communist novel into a video game.
“Over the last decade, we’ve started to see some governments use language eerily similar to oppressive regimes of the past,” continued Jele. “It’s the right time for us as creators as we are mature enough to take on the responsibility, it’s the right time for the audience as gamers are keen to experience more sophisticated themes and subject matters, and it’s the right time for society as we’re heading into an era uncomfortably similar to the universe described by George Orwell.”
The video game is currently still in the early stages of development so no release date has been announced.
Sources:
https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/6/16262886/animal-farm-video-game-george-orwell
https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/06/george-orwell-animal-farm-video-game/
