Jordan Thomas, lead writer of The Blackout Club and co-founder of the studio behind it, Question, thinks a lot about the legacy of his work. “If you want to make any kind of dent in history, and you’re working in games, you need to make something that alters the way genres work, or is wildly successful to the point where they’ll keep remaking it later.” For the Blackout Club, a game of modest financial success but with a dedicated fanbase, he’s long set his sights on the form🔜er. “If we are to go quietly into that good night, let’s at least do something really interesting. Let’s make sure that we stick in the memories of the people who were there.”
A full version of this interview is where you’ll also hear Thomas talk about designing Fort Frolic in Bioshock and𝐆 The Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows.
The Blackout Club is a co-op horror game about the small town of Redacre, Virginia. Every night, the people of Redacre sleepwalk into a s🐼ecret cave system beneath the town under the command of a being, or Voice, known as Speak-As-One. The titular Blackout Club is a group of teenagers that have organized to oppose Speak-As-One, uncover their machinations, and protect the kids of Redacre. TBC has elements of Stranger Things, Phasmophobia, and Dead by Daylight, but the way its story is told makes for a unique, one-of-a-kind experience.
The Blackout Club has a community-driven, entirely live narrative. Speak-As-One and the other Voices that seek to influence and contr꧅ol Redacre’s citizens are all performed by actors in real time - their roles are interactive experiences for the player that help craft a living, breathing narrative. Thomas describes the experience like a tabletop role-playing game where he plays the role of the dungeon master. “If you’ve played Dungeons and Dragons,” he says, “The Blackout Club is heavily influenced by what happens when you summon a demon and ask it its name.”
The Blackout Club launched on Steam in July 2019 after nine months in Early Access, but the concept for an interactive theater experience like TBC had been brewing in Thomas' mind for much longer. After finding success as the designer of famous levels like The Cradle from Thief 3, Fort Frolic from BioShock, and directing BioShock 2, Thomas was fatigued by triple-A development. Shortly after work on BioShock Infinite wrapped, Thomas and collaborator Stephen Alexander formed Question LLC and made their first indie game, The Magic Circle, a story-driven puzzle adventure about a protagonist developing an unfinished video game from within it. While The Magic Circle worked as a satirical look into game development, The Blackout Club aimed to explore games as a medium for expression and storytelling.
Games were headed in a different direction, moving away from $60, single-purchase adventures and towards transmedia experiences that more people can enjoy through “vicarious viewership,” as Thomas calls it. “Whether it was Twitch or YouTube or just talking about it on the forums,” Thomas says, “more꧒ and more it became the conversation about the game and not so much the game that was really gauging its cultural impact.” Thomas wanted to explore religion through the lens of an interactive story that everyone is a part of. “I felt like there were some powerful parallels that you could draw between what happens to a religion as they try to educate the next generation about what God wants and how the message mutates, like the telephone game, over time,” he explains. “You get sects and dogmatic branches to the point where people who might be the descendants of a single faith end up fighting each other.” With The Blackout Club, T𝓡homas could create his own version of religion that would be “experienced as whispers, rumors, and partial understandings, shared between the community to help everyone understand that everyone drives progress.”
The Blackout Club has a wildly complex premise, and one that, Thomas admits, was difficult to communicate with new players. “It was massively ambitious,” he explains. “The Blackout Club's real flaws were that it was trying to do something absurdly new, essentially a runaway Ouija board with a fuel-injected engine strapped to it, and also a regular-ass video game.”
Screenshots and trailers couldn’t effectively s🐎ell what TBC had to offer, but by driving players from social media to the official Discord Server, Thomas and his team were able to develop a small yet fiercely dedicated fanbase. Those who have invested the time and been there for all The Blackout Club’s twists and turns have had a unique and personal experience with the game - one that can’t ever be replicated or replayed. “These f💜olks who have stuck with us get something out of it if they can get nowhere else,” he says. “Their loyalty to us is breathtaking.”
The Blackout Club’s story will soon come to an end, though Thomas isn’t prepared to say exactly when that 🥃will be. It largely depends on the availability of the actors, who weren’t able to participate in live events throughout much of the pandemic for obvious safety reasons. “I’ve been keeping this little lighthouse lit with my every weekend for the entire pandemic, trying to get to the point where we could safely get the cast back in, and now it’s happening,” he says. We are working on it now out of pure passion. That’s us just throwing our lives into it basically after hours because we love it and we love those people, the players that s༒tuck with us through the pandemic.
“I value their time, which they may or may not know, but I think constantly about how best to use it and how not to waste it. As✃ we’re getting closer to the end, we’re opening fewer doors and closing a lot more. I think that’s healthy. I mean God, they deserve some kind of closure after all this time.”
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