Today, I can finally, officially announce what I’ve been doing for the past year up in Seattle.  Yep, I’m co-writing Destiny, Bungie’s incredibly ambitious new shared world, first person shooter franchise with a 10-year story to tell.

I feel incredibly lucky that my journey as a video game writer over the past few years has taken me to such an incredible place.  A true dream job.

Variety got how I feel about Destiny just about right when they called it: “Mythical science fiction with time traveling robots, magic-wielding warlocks wearing exotic capes, warrior rhinos, spider pirates and evil space zombies.”

Then also wrote, helpfully: “Destiny essentially takes elements that worked for Halo, Mass Effect, Journey, World of Warcraft and Borderlands, and combines them into one game that Activision and Bungie hope will entice gamers to devote the next 10 years of their lives to playing as the release of book-like chapters introduce new stories throughout the years.”

Of course, we still got a while before the disc is out in people’s hands.  But I can tell you, I’ve played the game, a lot, and it is unbelievably fun.  You will not be able to go back to other shooters once you’ve played Destiny.

Here’s the Vi-Doc that Bungie released this morning.  It gives me goose bumps to see the first nuggets of the story I’ve been crafting with my co-writers since last spring start to filter out into the world’s imagination.  And, yes, I think that is my arm reaching into frame around the 3:30 mark. : )

Press:

Here’s some links to some of my favorite press I’ve read so far:

Polygon did a really thorough write-up: here.  They also did a really great piece on Bungie as company a couple weeks ago: here.

I’m really happy, as a long time screenwriter, to see the mainstream Hollywood media giving the game positive buzz too.

The Variety article is: here.

And the Hollywood Reporter has a really solid interview with the president of Activsion, our publisher: here.

Concept Art:

A bunch of wonderful art has started to go public too, and I’ll give you as much as I can share without getting in trouble.  These are my favorite pieces of what’s been released.  Enjoy!

Color me impressed, sir.  If I were you, I’d give Bungie a call.  I hear they’re hiring.

David Cage, video game auteur and boundarie pusher, is behind this.  It’s a prototype of human simulation software running on the Playstation 3.

Take a breath, and try not to be moved by this.

Amazing sketch from the British comedy series: “That Mitchell & Webb Look.”

You can’t imagine how many of these guys I’ve written for.  Producers who say these exact same words to me.  And all I can do is try hard not to laugh.

Who ever said writing is easy?

How bizarre and great is it to see Kermit discovering he has a wire on his arm, and Fozzie accepting that he’s not a real bear?

unnamed soundsculpture from Daniel Franke on Vimeo.

According to Deadline Hollywood:
The stop-motion animation short, about a lonely office desk toy taking a cross-country trip with the help of Google Street View, has gone viral, amassing 1.7 million viewers since it was posted 12 days ago.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

What 11:11 on 11/11/11 means to me…

About twenty years ago today, I was travelling in India when I had an interesting realization. I had, for a number of years, become slowly aware that I would see 11:11 appear on digital clocks an inordinate number of times – bordering on the supernatural. So often, when I would glance down at my cheap Casio travel watch, I would see an 11:11 flashing up at me. It felt somehow special or meaningful, so I decided to start keeping track of it.

That day in India, I began writing down every time I saw 11:11, where I was and what I was doing. And a pattern began to emerge. 11:11 actually seemed to be acting like a kind of Beacon. — The more frequently I saw 11:11, the more it seemed I was making Right Choices in my life, and the less often I saw it, the more it seemed to feel like I wasn’t living, perhaps, as authentically as I could.

Somehow 11:11 felt like a message system from somewhere deep in the universe, a warm/cold ticker-tape of my daily direction choosing, my own direct link to a personal, supernatural guide. Each 11:11, a little wink from the Creator. The more often the numbers appeared to me, the more I felt like I was getting closer to their Source! I felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who starts carving mountains in his mashed potatoes, and keeps seeing the same mountain with more and more frequency, until the mountain finally draws him to it.

But what was my mountain? If I was being given a magical guide through life, what was the goal? Where was I being led?

As I peered ahead into the future, creating over the years an increasingly complex personal, numerological mythology around 11:11, it was hard not to imagine that, somehow, today – 11/11/11 at 11:11 – was when it would all become revealed. The goal, the meaning, the purpose of twenty years of mystical messages.

And yet here I am… Today, just a few hours left to go. And I’m no clearer on what any of it was about, not the numbers, nor any of the daily choice that carried me from India to Culver City.

But that’s not a surprise. In truth, I stopped writing down every 11:11 that I saw a long time ago.

I’m left with an interesting 200-page journal of random moments over a couple decades – but it lacks any kind of synthesis or clarity. The thing I craved long ago, when I felt like a carefully-coded treasure map had been handed to me, was the treasure at the end. And that treasure was the meaning of it all. And here I am at what must be the end of the rainbow, the greatest accumulation of 11’s that all those other 11’s long ago were leading me to – and the pot’s empty. There is nobody behind the curtain waiting with answers.

Yet, here I am. And I have to be honest with myself. I look around at my life, and it’s a good life. I’m happily married to the woman it seems like I was destined to be with. We’ve created a child who is stunningly precocious, and could only have sprung from the union of our two souls. And I have a career that pays me to be creative, and work at home in pajamas. All I lack, it seems, is the meaning of it all. But really, who ever gets that?

Maybe this is it. Maybe this is exactly where that beacon was leading me.

Life is good days and bad. And I still seem to glance up randomly just in time to see an 11:11 on the clock whenever the days are good ones. And when the days are bad, a sudden, surprising 11:11 sighting will still fill me with warmth and a sense that, despite everything, I’m actually doing okay. That I’m still going the right way.

11/11/11… This isn’t the mountain that I’ve reached today, but really, just another heightened moment to check in, and ask myself: Am I living as authentically as I can? Are we all?