DISPATCH

Trading the cowl for a telephone headset in a superhero call centre

- 

During a recent interview, James Gunn, director of the latest Superman reboot, was asked about the spectre of superhero fatigue.

The problem, he argued, wasn’t superheroes, but rather the fact that so many superhero movies have decided to tell the same story. The makers of Dispatch, which you can view as a game about superhero fatigue – it’s definitely about fatigued superheroes – clearly agree with Gunn. In Dispatch, a down-on-their-luck superhero crashes out of the costumed world and goes to work as a telephone dispatcher for other heroes. The game is filled with outlandish characters with wild powers, but many of them are working in a drab call centre and dealing with the petty injustices of office life. So, when it comes to superhero stories, Nick Herman, COO at AdHoc Studio, is clear: “A lot of stuff that it seems that other people care a lot about, we try not to.”

There's an excellent reason for this. As pithy and punkish as Dispatch is, it’s not a product of contrarianism as much as it’s an attempt to dig a bit deeper into familiar fantasies and make them jarringly human again. “We like to look at different corners of this stuff and find our own interesting questions to answer,” Herman says. “Every scene to us is really about the characters and what’s happening, their heads in the scene,” adds Dennis Lenart, Herman’s fellow co-founder and director at AdHoc. “We try to craft it in a way that’s relatable and feels like it would be an interesting scene full of conflict if these people didn’t have powers.”

Talking so much about scenes and drama makes sense for these people. Herman and Lenart both spent time at Telltale Games making story-based adventures such as The Wolf Among Us, and their team at AdHoc is filled with people who have worked at the narrative end of videogames.