For years now, Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Megan Ganz have been part of the team bringing us joy, memes, and a steadily declining respect for humanity through the nihilistic comedy of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which, according to McElhenney, thankfully isn’t going anywhere anytime soon). And, somehow, they’ve also found time to create a new comedy series for Apple TV+, improbably titled Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, which focuses on a team of game developers running the world’s biggest MMORPG.
The new series is more of a traditional workplace comedy than whatever the hell we try to define Sunny as – somewhere between Silicon Valley and The Office – exploring the creative, kooky, and sometimes volatile personalities that might populate a major game studio. You can get a sneak peek behind the scenes of Mythic Quest in our exclusive featurette above or in the player below.
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During a recent interview at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, McElhenney (who also stars in Mythic Quest) told IGN that the show came about because Ubisoft (which also produces the series alongside Lionsgate and 3 Arts Entertainment) initially approached him about coming up with a series set in the world of gaming.
“I was reticent at first because I didn’t see a way in that was clear. And they invited me up to Montreal to come visit their studio. While I was there and walking around, I met so many different people, so many disparate personalities who were there for the same reason, which is that they loved games, they wanted to build a game,” McElhenney said. “It was seemingly the only thing that they had in common. I thought, wow, this is a mega-successful studio. All of these people are bonded together by a common love of games, and specifically the games that they were working on. And so, oftentimes they didn’t get along with the people that they were working with, but they were trapped together, and they were trapped together because of their love. I thought, ‘there’s something inherently, intrinsically interesting about that.'”
McElhenney said that the team at Ubisoft have been an invaluable resource in terms of research and technical knowledge – the company created all the in-show graphics for the fictional game at its center – but also provided insight on the specific challenges of the industry.
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“We populated the writers’ room with people who have worked in the industry before and massive gamers, who can take us so far, but then, at a certain point we sometimes hit a brick wall and I say, ‘oh, I realize I need to speak to someone who’s on the ground right now’ … and they’ve just been so receptive to the questions and introspection and then, also making sure that the show feels authentic,” he explained. “That is a really important part of what we’re trying to do, to make sure that we are not doing a commercial for Ubisoft. We’re not doing a commercial even for video games. What we’re trying to do is explore a very specific workplace, all of the positives and all of the negatives, all of the celebration and success, and all the foibles specifically of the people that are there. In doing that, you explore a lot of things that are tricky for, specifically, say, Ubisoft, because they’re wrestling with some really difficult things that the entire industry is.”
He added, “We said to them from the very beginning, ‘we want to make sure that we’re creating something that is not pandering, that is authentic, and if you don’t allow us to be honest, they’ll smell it.’ To their credit, Ubisoft said, ‘we would never even consider doing that, mostly because we’re afraid of the fallout.’ They respect their community and audience so much that they’re not going to put us, themselves, or the players, in a situation where they’re going to deliver something that feels – which would be the worst – false. Because… we can do comedy. Comedy is in some ways easy. What is difficult is capturing an industry, a community, a culture of people in a way that, when you watch it, sure, it’s funny, but then it feels close to what you know and understand, even if you’re working in it every day.”
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In terms of creating the aesthetic for the game version of Mythic Quest, McElhenney said it was a balancing act between what the writers had envisioned, the reality of what the game might realistically look like, and, on top of that, “there were economic realities in terms of what we can actually execute … It takes five years to make a lot of these games, and we’ll be ‘making’ them in six months,” he pointed out.
“It was important to us to make sure that we were making an MMORPG because that’s a big open world. It involved a community of people who were playing and there was a constant iteration to the gaming experience; new expansions, new weapons, new skins, always every day there’s something new – a new playable item in the game. In doing so, we had to look at games like World of Warcraft and say, okay, well what are they doing in that game that we can utilize and what are they doing in other games that we can utilize and make so that it feels specific to this game, Mythic Quest, but then it also feels like it’s generic enough to where the general audience can watch it and say, ‘oh, I get what that is,’ even though they’ve never seen it before?”
Naturally, you can expect to see plenty of easter eggs and homages to other games in the show – even from studios other than Ubisoft.
“One thing that was really a lot of fun was trying to find other games from other studios that we could put into the show. And there were some studios that were really resistant because they’d never seen the show before, and they didn’t want to see their games derided in any way. They didn’t want to see us taking shots at them or making fun of them,” McElhenney said. “I totally understand that – they’re protecting their games, and they don’t know what we’re going to do; they don’t know what our show was going to be. And yet, there were still a lot of studios that were like, ‘this seems fun, sure, let’s put them in there.’ There’s a lot of different games in the show and I think it’ll be fun for fans to go through and pick ’em out. But what I’m hoping for is next year people will see the show and they’ll recognize what we’re trying to do, and then that’ll open up a whole new catalog of games that we can explore.”
Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet premieres globally with all nine episodes of Season 1 on Friday, February 7 on Apple TV+. The series has already been renewed for Season 2 and also stars F. Murray Abraham, Danny Pudi, Imani Hakim, Charlotte Nicdao, David Hornsby, Ashly Burch, and Jessie Ennis.
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Source: IGN.com How Ubisoft Helped Bring Rob McElhenney's Mythic Quest to Life