District 9 director Neill Blomkamp on the over-the-top, ultra-violent satire of Off the Grid
11.13.2024
By Brian Crecente, Contributor
Released in early access last month, the Gunzilla developed game is a high-fidelity shooter with a razor-sharp hook: The contestants trying to kill one another on the game’s constructed island have not only volunteered to participate in all the death, but also to have their limbs chopped off and replaced with interchangeable cybernetics.
In action, this means a player can quickly add and swap out skills—such as lighting-fast running, cloaking, goo-guns, and more—simply by grabbing limbs off the battlefield or from the recently killed (or delimbed).
They can also have those limbs popped off with a precise shot, leaving them limbless—or a limb down, but alive. There’s also jet packs, grappling hooks, and a map that at times feels almost as vertical as it is horizontal. And there’s the glimpses of Off the Grid’s compelling story told through a mashup of in-game and live-action interstitials.
The game’s visual design and overall aesthetic is heavily inspired by 2013 dystopian sci-fi action flick Elysium, thanks to the early and ongoing involvement of that movie’s writer and director Neill Blomkamp.
And then there is the NFT—lightly woven into the game’s extraction mechanics—which is designed to help players track the things they fought so hard to pull off the island.
All of this—the crazy backstory, the unique storytelling, the NFT, the mix of movement methods, and unique ways to power-up a character beyond simply the guns they carry—is secondary to achieving the sort of buttery-smooth movement and control necessary to make sure a shooter of any type can survive in a market that includes the likes of Call of Duty, Battlefield, Apex Legends, PUBG, Fortnite, and so many more.
And that’s a good thing, at least from Blomkamp’s point of view. The director, who is currently spending a lot of his time exploring storytelling in a genre not typically known for it, took a moment recently to chat about his unusual involvement in the game, why he’s so interested in video games in general, and what he hopes to achieve with this game in particular.
Elysium
For Blomkamp, it all started about four years ago with Elysium.
Gunzilla CEO and co-founder Vlad Korolev “kept saying that he wanted Elysium to basically be the reference for the game,” Blomkamp said. “He was obsessed with this idea of a sort of, you know, sun-bleached cyberpunk setting.”
Blomkamp said he loved the concept and was, as it turned out, very open to the idea of working on video games. The writer and director had an early career working in visual effects as an artist and 3D animator.
“It’s kind of a piece of creativity that I always really missed when I was working in film,” he said. “Like being more connected to just the CG in general. And I kind of have this obsession with real-time graphics as well, like Unreal Engine, or Unity back in the day.”
So when Blomkamp was given the opportunity to help with a game, he approached it more as someone who wanted to get back into creating things in a three-dimensional virtual environment.
“I wanted to work on games, but not actually because I thought I could make a game, it was more that I thought I could play around in 3D graphics,” he said.
The concept for the game—specifically the ideas driven by those hot-swappable cyberlimbs—had already been nailed down before Blomkamp got involved, he said. They also already had noted British sci-fi and fantasy writer Richard K. Morgan working on the early concepts of the story.
“So I built on top of those ideas with the stuff that interests me and that is kind of like Elysium and what Vlad wanted,” he said. “What happened was that we reached a certain point and then we actually actively changed the tone on purpose because we came up with this idea of it all being in a real battle royale. So it’s kind of like The Hunger Games or [The] Running Man.”
Biting satire
Blomkamp’s films from District 9 to Demonic are often most remembered for the amazing job they do of blending a low-fi documentary shooting style with captivating computer-generated effects. The movies all also tend to tackle deeper themes like apartheid (District 9), classism (Elysium), or religion (Demonic). With Off the Grid, the team is leaning heavily on the sort of biting satire and overabundance of violence and weapons found in movies like RoboCop.
In the opening video for the game (all shown in computer graphics), players are introduced to the world of Off the Grid, a “real-life gaming arena with all of the thrills of an online shooter but in the real world.” Clips of players blowing each other up and shooting each other are interspersed with reaction shots from people sitting on couches as they watch the carnage on TV.
Volunteers for the game opt to have their limbs removed so they can compete in the battle, where they have a chance to win up to $100 million. The trailer also includes shots of news shows reacting to the carnage, limbs being cut off, and montages of cyberlimb rehab.
“These people are just regular folks who have opted into total madness,” one of the newscasters says.
The trailer turns dark as it talks about resuscitating players from even “extreme fatalities. They can regrow the patent from base tissue.”
It’s clear in the trailer that the game represents a real-world phenomenon, and that there are some people who love watching it and others who see it as depravity.
Another video highlights an influencer who buoyantly tells her audience that she’s going to the island. By the end of the video, with a couple of defeats under her belt, she doesn’t look so happy.
“This is a completely real place and everything that we release, each update that we release going forward will reinforce the idea that this is a real-world battle royale,” Blomkamp said. “So there’s a lot of inherent satire in that, and the satire has layers of humor that will begin to bleed into the game more and more.”
Blomkamp said he’s not sure if there’s a specific issue the game is addressing in the ways his movies have, but that the game is “definitely 1000% consciously self-aware that it's a violent video game.” It’s also a game that is “super American-centric in terms of culture.”
The storytelling for the game initially arrives in surprising places, like the trailer, a couple of cinematic videos released outside the game, and even the interstitials that play while the map is loading.
I pointed out in our interview that I actually didn’t see those interstitials, which blend live-action with CG, until I had been playing the game for a while. Out of habit, I skipped the video when it popped up. It wasn’t until my third or fourth game that I watched one, only after catching a glimpse of live-action and being intrigued by what it might show.
Blomkamp wasn’t annoyed; in fact, he said that was exactly what he expected to happen.
“You did exactly the right thing,” he said. “The bread and butter is the player experience, right? They're dropping in to play. If you don’t get that right, you don’t have anything. So all of the videos, the further narrative stuff that we want to do, if it isn’t blatantly clear you can opt out of that and not have it affect your session, we would just be shooting ourselves in the foot.
“It's an added bonus that if you want it, it’s there.”
It’s extremely compelling and well put-together, reading like something you might watch in a Blomkamp feature film. He said they had actually just returned from Dubai where they were shooting more material for these interstitials.
“We just keep shooting more and more and more and whatever players do with it, they do with it,” he said. “If it helps amplify the experience, that’s cool, but it’s definitely not the main thing. That’s shooting other players.”
Live-action thrills
The interstitials have all been a blend of live-action and CG so far, while the cinematics and trailers have all been pure game graphics. Blomkamp said that the mix of the two sorts of video was the result of a lot of discussions. Initially, he didn’t like the idea of having live action in the mix, but because they play out in loading screens, he feels like it works.
“I shot that stuff to be very documentary,” he said. “It’s very District 9, and in the context I actually love it because it almost gives you this realistic window into the background of the world.”
The real deep dive into storytelling in the game hasn’t yet arrived in the early access title. Blomkamp and the team are working to create a narrative that will be threaded neatly into the live action of the battle royale.
“We’re busy making videos for the island which are narrative and you can watch in the middle of a firefight,” he said. “We’re trying to inject narrative missions that you can accomplish while fighting either in the extraction royale mode or battle royale mode.”
The idea is that, as with those interstitials, players will have to decide they want to pay attention to this sub-plot of narrative that bubbles up in a session. The consent has a lot of challenges, he points out, including how you make a player safe in the midst of this game while watching a video, how you deal with players on a team being split up, and how you balance the level of knowledge all of the players have about the game’s story in a group.
“So it poses a lot of interesting challenges, but the result could be quite cool,” he said.
The concept of narrative for the world being delivered during a live battle-royale session comes from the studio’s CEO, Vlad Korolev. The current plans for what story they tell not only includes the background of how the world got to a place where it seems like a good idea to do a real-world battle royale, but also the stories of the people who live on this island and the challenges they face to survive not just the gun battles, but day-to-day life.
A familiar face
The main narrator for the game as you play is voiced by long-time Blomkamp collaborator Sharlto Copley (District 9, Elysium, Chappie). As Cobra, Copley barks hilarious orders and insults at you throughout a match.
Blomkamp said he wanted him on board the game because he felt like it needed a face. Cobra isn’t just a sort of in-game drill sergeant; he’s also going to be one of the lead characters that pulls you through the narrative of the game.
While Copley isn’t a hardcore gamer, he used to join sessions of Counter-Strike with Blomkamp and the team at the studio in Vancouver. He also voiced a character for Payday 4.
“He was down with doing this because this sort of satire that we’re going for is very much a tone Sharl and I [are] interested in going after,” Blomkamp said.
It may seem like an odd choice for a known storyteller to decide to support a game in a genre least known for storytelling. Blomkamp said the simplest answer to why he decided to work on this game and not something more narratively driven was that he was asked to, and he liked the pitch.
But there’s another reason, he added.
“I'm not sure that I wanted to tell a story in video games,” he said. “I wanted to work inside building a 3D environment. I'm obsessed with real-time graphics and with the idea of building a 3D environment where sound is three-dimensional. You're working with the sound department. You're working with real-time graphics that [have] bouncing lights and reflections and radiosity, and it's just a very cool environment.”
A battle royale game, Blomkamp adds, lets you play with all of that.
Blomkamp said they’re pushing Unreal Engine’s MetaHumans as far as they will go, and leaning heavily into things like the engine’s Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections system.
NFTs
Layered in at a fairly basic level on top of the core gameplay loop, the intriguing approach to narrative, and the amazing look of the game is the fact that it also can feature NFTs.
Developer Gunzilla is very vocal about the fact that Off the Grid isn’t an NFT game. Instead, they point out that it’s a battle royale game with an optional NFT element. In its current state, that seems very much to be the case.
All of the items extracted from the game (by finding and extracting a Hex box at a node) are tied to NFTs that make them each unique. If a player pays for the game’s battle-pass-like subscription, they’re also given the ability to list these items on a marketplace and sell them for GUN crypto tokens.
It all operates a bit like a marketplace for Counter-Strike 2 skins, except these are all tied to cryptocurrency and the blockchain. The minting of the NFTs occurs in the game, and it plays out as you guarding a node from other players while it extracts the Hex for you.
Blomkamp said the blockchain and NFT connected to the game were already present with the original concepts when he got involved. He added that there are people at the studio with much deeper knowledge of how it all works, but for him, it all seems logical.
“It reminds me of CS: GO skins,” he said. “It’s basically being able to more accurately track your items and being able to know the rarity and letting the marketplace determine the value. To me it seems like a benefit, so I’m not exactly sure what the downside is. Why wouldn’t you want to have access to all of the stuff that you accumulated over hundreds of hours of playing?”
He added that he suspects once the game launches there will be a strategy to better explain to potential players how the NFT element of the game works.
Ultimately, Blomkamp said, he hopes that people are more interested in the game itself than the NFT that lurks as an opt-in option.
“I hope they are talking about what they like about the game and how the game can be better,” he said. “I wouldn’t want NFTs getting in the way of all of the other work of the last four years that has gone into making this game.”
What's next
When a director so comfortable in the virtual worlds of video games and the practical effects of movie making is working on a video game, it begs the question if a movie is in the pipeline as well.
”I think because it is satirically rich and it does touch on [The] Running Man and RoboCop and movies that I love that have this kind of sharpened sort of societal satire, I would love to make a movie,” Blomkamp said. “But trying to just make it at the moment become a game that gamers like and that is successful with gamers is obviously extremely difficult and a full-time thing.
“If we get to that point and it feels like there's enough awareness of it that you can make a feature out of that, [that] would be super cool.”
Currently, Blomkamp is splitting his time between working on this game and movies.
“I’d say it’s 50/50,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out a film right now. I can’t say what it is. I need it to go well and get it figured out.”
Despite the fact that his last two movies (Demonic and Gran Turismo) were not sci-fi, Blomkamp said that science fiction is still his main point of interest for films.
And what about that initial pitch to Blomkamp? The idea of his 2013 film Elysium being the game’s main point of reference.
“Visually, if you hit pause on the game at any moment, like I do, it does aesthetically have an Elysium-esque feel to it because that's where all of the beginning designs came from. Like when I did the designs with Nick for the guns when I did the designs with Nick for the player outfits.”
But it doesn’t feel like a playable version of that film, nor was it ever meant to.
“The core difference, I think, is the satirical stuff that we were talking about,” he said. “The self-referential, self-awareness, game industry stuff that you're only going to see more of. That is a departure from Elysium, so the game to me now is like a hybrid of gritty real-world cyberpunk with a layer of satire. And that's what it should be.”
Off the Grid is currently in early access on Epic Games Store.