The Key to Telling a Great Story: Hire Paul Jenkins, Author of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

by Louis Bedigian

“Writing about yourself is ultimately the key to bringing your audience in.”

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction isn't just a pretty face. Its beastly exterior and polygon build complement the story. On this rare occasion gamers have the opportunity to play a comic book game that was written by the same man who works on the actual comics: Paul Jenkins.

Known for his work on Batman, Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk, Paul made his move to the game industry with Soul Reaver and Twisted Metal: Black.  Anyone in the game industry will tell you that once you get a taste of gaming you never want to leave. That, and his work on The Incredible Hulk comics, led Paul to the Ultimate destination he's arrived at today. The fact that his writing rocks is the reason he was hired in the first place.

I spoke with Paul about The Incredible Hulk: The Ultimate Destruction and learned that he's becoming increasingly engrossed in the game industry. "I'm primarily a writer of comic books," he said. "I spent the last two years working a lot more in video games because I think they're a really interesting medium to work in. I've worked on Twisted: Metal Black and Soul Reaver and I'm currently writing The Darkness for the guys who did The Chronicles of Riddick [game]."

Paul’s first feature film, Burn, is about to enter production.

What else is he doing? What else has he done? And how challenging has it all been? 

What was it like working on Twisted Metal: Black?

Paul Jenkins: I worked with David Jaffe (creator of God of War) at Sony. Some of the stuff was already worked out when I came on board. It was a little bit more of a last-minute thing. They had me come in and kind of stitch things up because it was beginning to fall apart. I got along really well with David Jaffe at Sony, he's a really nice guy.

Are you a full-time comic book writer? How much writing, conceptualizing, etc., does this amount to?

PJ: Yes and no. For years I was a full-time comic freelancer, so yeah I'm a full-time writer in that sense. But since I'm now working on video games I actually have a film production company that I started in the last year or so. My partner and I have been working toward making our first feature-length film which is in pre-production right now.

How much writing and conceptualizing does that amount to?

PJ: More than I can even describe. It is a crazy amount of work. Writing a video game is a little bit like writing a jigsaw puzzle. Rather than doing it in a linear fashion where I can break down the pacing of the story, which you might do in a film or a novel or a comic book, you're really collaborating with the designers to make sure the overall feeling the player gets is a certain kind of emotional response.

It's very difficult to predict what's going to happen if you're writing a very involved story like The Hulk and you've got a couple of people doing something in a story. You've got a couple of people doing something in a story – Bruce Banner does this, The Hulk does that. And then you realize that the player at any given moment can actually walk off and play a mini-game for six hours of gameplay. How does the story necessarily relate to that? That's one of the things we hope to have accomplished with this game.

Is there an approval system? How much does Marvel want to know about your story, the characters, etc., before they give the green light?

PJ: One of the helpful things for Radical and Vivendi is that I've written The Hulk as a comic book before. Marvel pretty much handed me the keys to the car in a sense and say, “Okay, go ahead and drive it. There's really no problem. We know that Paul has done so much work on this character.”

In fact, part of the story is based on the run I had on The Hulk over a couple of years. Knowing that I was in a sense making – I was part of the quality control on behalf of Marvel in a sense because I was able to write the story. What it meant was that it was much easier in the approval process. Not for the gameplay, but I didn't necessarily have to make suggestions to the story.

What does it take to make an old comic book character new again? Or is it not about making an old character seem new, but about finding a way to continue the story better than before?

PJ: Every time, the writer's answer to that, is every time that I've stepped into the arena of writing any issue of any comic. Spider-Man – I did that character for five years. But I'm particularly fond of writing one short story. Unlike writing one story that goes month to month, I like to write one that's in the issue so you pick it up and end it. I think the challenge is always How can you reinvent the character, what do you have to say?

Character is just a reflection of the writer and a reflection of the reader. If you arrive at a character and say, "I don't know how to say anything with this character," then I think you probably shouldn't try to muscle your way through it. I just look at The Hulk and go Wow, it's an amazing metaphor for the rage we have inside. I found that very interesting to write about.

A lot of what we put into The Hulk, especially in this game, is the sort of ticking time bomb mentality you use to get with the old TV show. Oh no, he's been arrested! Eventually he's going to turn into The Hulk and he doesn't want to turn into The Hulk.

In particular with this game as opposed to the last game, if you're talking about a direct comparison to Hulk 1, when the guys came to me with Hulk 1, they asked me what I thought of the game. I was very honest. I told them that the biggest problem was the way the story came out and the emotional response you wanted actually brought into the gameplay. In that version you kind of went through a tunnel and faced various opponents.

That doesn't make the story big. You have guns blazing and things being thrown at you. That doesn't make you feel like The Hulk, it makes you feel like a soldier. The new game is free-roaming kind of game, so instead of going down a tunnel, you can basically choose to go left, right, or go up. And if that's the case that means you have control over The Hulk, so when you initiate combat, you can choose to be big at that moment as opposed to just reacting to something. I think that was a really important difference in the way this game works. 

Can you give us an idea of what the game is about? We know there's a lot of action and destruction, but how does the story tie into all that?

PJ: It ties into the ticking bomb mentality. This is the problem Bruce Banner has. He has within him a raging creature. That creature is The Hulk. But as a result of the way that his mind has been fractured by the mutation, he also has other problems.

One of the nastier things is an aspect of his personality that's called the Devil Hulk. The premise is that within us all we have the potential to be good or bad. We have God and the devil within us. This is the aspect of his personality that is desperately wanting to come out. It's beginning to emerge, and it actually happens in his main rival. He becomes the abomination that Banner wants to avoid becoming.

The abomination twists the guy and the guy twists the abomination until there's just this massive enemy that's running around the planet, and Banner comes in as The Hulk to stop it. At the same time as he stops it he's got this three-sided front. He's got the abomination on one side and all the other enemies, he's got the army chasing him on the other side, and internally he's got the Devil Hulk emerging. He has to solve the problem of The Hulk before the Devil Hulk emerges, and when the Devil Hulk emerges he's going to be a very unreasonable person.

Do you know how the game developers are going to present your story (are there animated sequences, comic book stills, etc.)?

PJ: There are animated sequences. I certainly think that the preferable way to do it in video games is to do game-generated sequences. You run near characters and as you go near characters you learn information about the story. In this case I think we opted [to do full-motion video] because we had an interesting story to tell. I'm hoping that what happens is as you get to those full-motion videos that tell you a bit more of the story, you want to receive that. It's like a gift movie that the player gets to enjoy.

I've heard you talk about the importance of finding yourself in every character you write. Is it true that all of the people in Spider-Man's apartment building are based on your friends?

PJ: Yes. When I wrote Spider-Man for sometime I had this mad cast of characters that lived up and around him. There's one character [based on a guy] that I played soccer with. He's this outrageous guy from New Zealand. He's absolutely awful. He's just a woman-hunting crazy idiot, and he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. But there's a part of him that you love 'cause he's so stupid.

That also comes with anecdotal stuff as well. There are word for word translations for things that have happened with myself and my wife. You also find that real information is far more entertaining to the audience than trying to think of something or write about something you may have heard about. Writing about yourself is ultimately the key to bringing your audience in. 

How do you feel about villains? A lot of people think that you have to be able to relate to your villains, that you should find part of yourself in every character -- what is your take on that?

PJ: I feel a little bit differently. I guess not necessarily having to relate it to yourself... The simplest way I've ever been able to explain the way I write villains is this. It's a very extremely example, but I think it makes a lot of sense:

If you were to get an old movie of Adolf Hitler, who might be one of the most evil people that's ever lived on this planet. At some point you might see him wandering around, being nice to children. Apparently he was a dog lover, he really loved dogs. You see him walking around the streets with his dogs, throwing sticks. You might think, "Wow, what a nice man."

The choice that Adolf Hitler then made was that he had a capacity to love animals and to love children. He took that capacity and ignored it in favor of the genocide of several million people. That to me makes a villain. That's a person who's capable.

A guy who's a complete lunatic isn't necessarily a villain. I think part of the problem is that we get lots of lunatics written, people who have no capacity for compassion. People will learn, and I don't want to give away the story, but people are going to learn that the main character that you face. You're going to assume, "This is the thing that drove him, this is the thing that drove him." I think it will be quite surprising when people realize that what made him become the abomination and turn the way he did is not necessarily just his anger.

Going back to the game, how far in advance did you have to finish the story or have it nearly complete before the developers could start to base things around it?

It was a constant collaboration. That's why I think it's so amazing. I think it's safe to say that the guys at Radical were just brilliant. They brought me up there and I gave them my spiel on why I thought video games worked and why I thought they didn't work, and it was partly the consumer and partly the storyteller. I sat with them and I said, "Here's what I know and here's what I think." One of the things I think is a problem with video games is the way they're presented. We don't necessarily advance the character. To their credit they fell for it [laughs]. They completely committed to advancing the story on an equal level to advancing the gameplay. But then what I committed to was understanding how the gameplay made the story work. So we continued to collaborate and collaborate, so we were on a daily basis. We continued to make suggestions to the story and make adjustments to the gameplay, but overall we kept the story and the gameplay as intact as possible 'cause that was our goal.

Now it's finished, the game is finally released... What's next for you?

PJ: I'm working on The Darkness with the guys who developed The Chronicles of Riddick. It's actually a comic book as well. Then the sky's the limit as far as the future's concerned. I really like doing video games, I think it's something I'm probably going to do a lot more of.

I talked to a few people who do the same job I do. It's a very interesting aspect, writing for video games. If you are a professional writer that's done things in certain forums, movies, comic books or whatever, and you really commit to writing good stories in video games... There may only be 15 or 20 of us right now. These are people who are learning how these games are developed, and how they're designed and how the art works. As opposed to someone who just comes in, pitches a story, sells it to the publisher and goes away. I don't think that's going to work for anybody.

So you see the future game writers being more like screenwriters who also direct or produce – they're involved with the project.

PJ: That's a perfect way of putting it. It's a collaborative medium and it should be a collaborative medium. The writers have to have the ability and understand that as you develop a game, there's a technical issue. Someone's going to call you one day and say, "You know that bit we really liked? We can't do it 'cause it's going to cost us $1.2 million to do, we just realized it. What can we do to change that?" And you as the writer is going to have the humility to say, "Well, I've got an idea. I think we can do this, that, or the other."

It works the other way around. I think the developers are beginning to have the humility to understand that one of the guys who works in the building, for instance, wrote the game. In some notable exceptions that's worked out well. But in many cases the guy who writes the story is not a professional writer, and it show in the game.

Before I let you go, can you give us any hint as to what we can expect from The Darkness?

PJ: The obvious thing I would point to is take a look at my run on The Darkness, and probably the first few issues. That should give you a good sense of how the story comes out.

I think the guy is an interesting character contradiction 'cause he's got kind of a heart. At least that's how I've written him. He's a killer. He's desperately looking for a family, so he picks the most dysfunctional family in the world, which is the mafia. Then he goes around killing people. Having said that, he wants the mafia to work a certain way. He's very old-fashioned. Like Al Capone where people were nice to each other. Honor among thieves, which is very naive.

As far the gameplay goes...madness! [Laughs] You'll find out.

Sounds awesome. Thanks for a great interview. I can't wait for The Darkness, and I look forward to your future games, comic books, movies, and whatever else you apply your talents to.