ΤΗΕ MAKING 0F WE ARE OFK

How Teddy Dief and team got the band together, on screen and in the real world

- MAUNDY HETFELD

Videogames and music have always been intertwined, whether it’s soundtracking a climactic moment or providing the heartbeat of a rhythm-action game. Games that focus on the experience of being a musician, however, are much rarer. Telling the story of a band, then, would be enough to make We Are OFK stand out – even if the band in question weren’t one that blurred the lines between real and virtual, existing and releasing music outside of the game but played by fictional avatars. It’s a concept so unusual that creative director Teddy Dief was immediately confronted with one question: why make this a game?

“My friend Scott Benson, who co-wrote Night In The Woods with Bethany Hockenberry, got a very similar question,” Dief says. “Because he was historically an animator, people for some reason thought he could only use that one medium to tell his story. The easiest answer for us is that We Are OFK is a game because that’s what we knew how to, and were enabled to, make. In this industry you’re trying to make things whenever you’re able, and we saw this as a way to get a game made sustainably and get some good people paid.”

There’s a healthy dose of television in the mix too, between the game’s foregrounding of narrative over the mechanics and the weekly release schedule for its five episodes. “We consciously exist in a space between media,” Dief says. It’s certainly a far cry from Hyper Light Drifter, the game for which Dief is arguably best known, and which they describe as “not divisive”, being geared towards a more traditional gaming audience. With OFK, Dief admits, there was an element of wanting to step away from that – as well as telling a story that was uniquely theirs.