Falling in love with comics
I remember coming back from school one day, passing by a bookstore; They had a book called Detective Conan in a cartoon magazine. I already knew the show from TV,
I was still curious to see more. I went inside, opened it, and it was just a bunch of distinct comics from a variety of shows. That was my very earliest memory of comic books.
Then, I started watching Naruto and Attack on Titan, like many Japanese shows that are related to manga. Whenever it ended on
a cliffhanger, we would rush to the manga. Just like video games, comic books were a big part of our childhood, and today we will dig deep into how comics started and what impact they had on video games.
During the 1980s, limited technology shaped the way video games expressed their stories, making titles like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong rely heavily on simple gameplay. Their stories were usually brief and presented as a plain block of text or written in a separate manual.
It was hard for game developers to create a in-game stories that would resonate well with the audience. Reading a large wall of text is never exciting for majority of the people.
The Road to Gaming
The techniques used were mainly Pacing and Character Development alongside Visual Storytelling and Cinematic design to help gamers feel more connected and emotionally invested in the game through text.
This is where comic book storytelling and techniques became a handy tool to improve the overall player experience for the readers.
Art of Immersion
In comics, artists rely on dynamic panel layouts, extreme close-ups, and dramatic lighting to convey the action and mood of a certain moment without needing to use dialogue. Video game studios soon realized that adopting these storytelling strategies would make their world feel more alive and immersive for the players in general.
You can see this influence in games such as Max Payne, which completely replaces traditional animated cutscenes with visual panels and voiceovers, bringing it to life.
Titles like Borderlands or The Wolf Among Us adopted a comic book-inspired art style, such as shaded graphics and a vibrant colour palette, to make players
feel like they are navigating a world
in a comic book.
Hanging over the edge
The use of cliffhangers for chapter-based storytelling and pacing was taken straight from comic books as a method to develop character buildup, hooking readers slowly.
Many modern games separate their stories into acts or chapters that end with vital revelations that create sensational stages in the story. A formula for storytelling.
This keeps players motivated and eager to continue playing, like a comic reader who is eagerly waiting for the next episode to be released. This can be seen in games.
Such as The Last of Us, God of War, and Expedition 33, where the pace shifts between intense action and emotional moments in the story.
Piece by Piece
While the blueprint for pacing came from comic books, the gaming industry figured out that these narrative techniques could
be applied to original titles without comic backgrounds for better storytelling output. These were episodic storytelling games that changed how players experienced narrative-driven games and officially introduced a new genre of games in the publication market.
By breaking down dense, heavy plots into a few small episodic chapters, games were able to keep players captivated for weeks
on end and sometimes could take a few months or longer to release the episodes. This structure, combined with branching narratives that offered multiple distinct endings, is perfectly exemplified in the recent release Dispatch.
Preparing the Perfect Pace
A recent standout release of this format is
a choice-driven hero game called Dispatch. Instead of dumping the entire story at once or making players wait for months between episodes, they decided to release the whole 8-episode season weekly. The two episodes were launched at first, followed by chapters dropping every Wednesday over the course of a month. This approach simulated the real experience of a comic reader visiting a local shop every week to pick up the next chapter.
Each episode had a dramatic cliffhanger that had players on a hook and waiting for that next episode. The studio created a shared community experience where players debated online about how their decisions could impact the next upcoming episodes. Dispatch proved that the structure of pacing directly from comics publishing could make
a video game release feel like a recurring cultural event. You can find our full review
of Dispatch from our team here.
Choose Wisely
When it comes to story telling-focused game play, Telltale Games is the most
well-known name in the game industry. They have built their whole identity around releasing episodic story-driven games, much like comic books in terms of storytelling and even artistic choices.
Known titles were Batman and The Wolf Among Us. Some of these titles already had a fan base, which makes them more willing to embrace a new way of gaming.
Actions have Consequences
What made Telltale Games engaging is that the players actively made choices through dialogue options and decisions that often shaped how the story started and ended.
This created an emotional connection between the players and the story.
This also increases the replayability
of a game. Players often left thinking, “what if?” about every decision.
Fandom Culture
Traditionally, game developers expanded their franchises through products such as clothing, accessories, posters, toys, and action figures that are niche collectibles.
Comics and video games historically had different fan bases, with some crossover between them. Game developers quickly realized that expanding into comics could help them increase their fan base.
Gaming studios started to develop their own comics around their characters and their universe. Recent new games include Cyberpunk, Halo, The Last of Us, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and many more.
One of the most successful video game that was released in recent history and the winner of the Game of the Year in 2016 is Overwatch. When the game first came out, it had a lot of heroes, and many of them were inspired by different games such as Team Fortress 2 but had little to no background story about them.
To solve this, Blizzard started working on creating animated shorts for each hero so that players could understand them better. The videos gathered millions of views on YouTube and showed a real demand for Blizzard to expand more on the lore of each character. A simple strategy to educate them.
The road to gaming
However, those animated short movies were often short and lasted 2 two minutes long, which left a lot of players wanting more.
Blizzard started to release a series of free digital comics focused on their solo heroes and story events from the game after that.
These stories added emotional depth to each character that we only previously knew from gameplay. This approach allowed the gaming studio to keep its audience engaged while expanding into different genres to capture different audiences beyond just gamers.
Legendary Move
For many years, League of Legends was primarily known as an online battle arena competitive multiplayer game with many champions, but little was known about these characters’ stories or backgrounds. Players often wanted to experience and explore these characters and explore
the magic-infused world of Runeterra.
Riot Games recognized the potential of such a universe. They started publishing comics about the champions and regions featured in their game series. With a new form of artistic expression for the League of Legends universe. Writers, designers, and illustrators can now bring stories to life through visual narrative.
The comics were successful and proved that League of Legends was more than just a competitive online multiplayer game. The stories transformed the franchise into a fully developed fictional universe which paved the way for larger projects such as the animated series Arcane.
Cinematic Impact
The relationship between comic books and the video game industry is much stronger than people think. Comic books introduced ideas such as gradual story development, cliffhangers, and visual storytelling that helped games shine, a lasting impression.
The episodic releases helped keep more gamers engaged for a longer period of time. Developers had to adopt these techniques to make players invest in
their worlds, adding playtime hours.
Two Worlds Tied
As the game industry continues to grow to new heights, most of the studios have turned back to comic books as a way
of expansion. Games have shown that there is more to them than just gameplay and that these games can attract more.
Both genres continue to draw on each other’s ideas to improve the overall experience of their products.
Created by
Sae and AJ
