The 2015 choose-your-own-adventure-style horror romp Until Dawn is the latest video game adaptation to hit theaters this month. And while the film itself hasn’t impressed, opening in fifth place at the box office its opening weekend, there’s a deeper controversy that lifts the veil on a worrisome trend in gaming and how they’re being brought to the big screen.
Over the weekend, Kim MacAskill, a 10-year veteran of the film and video game industry posted on LinkedIn about the lack of proper credit given to those who originally penned the survival horror PlayStation exclusive. MacAskill, who worked with PlayStation between 2022 and 2024 according to her LinkedIn, said that she saw the new film and unhappily discovered that its credits didn’t list Larry Fessenden, Graham Reznick, Will Byles, or any of the others responsible for writing Until Dawn’s story.
“Instead of you mentioning the leading game devs who created this iconic game you’re clearly proud of, you just wrapped it as ‘based on the Sony game’” MacAskill wrote. “They spent years breaking their brains to make something incredible and the world deserves to know their names. Instead, no credit. No thanks. No honor.”
MacAskill also called into question why Neil Druckmann, one of the creators of The Last Of Us, gets credit for his work on the award-winning story when others who work on PlayStation games turned movies aren’t guaranteed to get the same. She’s since started a petition on Change.org to get Sony to amend the lack of credit in the film, and to change the way it credits others who’ve worked on games that will get translated into other mediums. As of this writing, the petition has 236 verified signatures.
“Despite the immense dedication, creativity, and innovation given to Sony, the creators were not honored by name in the movie,” the petition reads. “When an author’s book is made into a movie, they aren’t concealed by the publisher. When TV writers have their show made into a movie, they aren’t concealed by their production house. The rules around game IP are dated, and with transmedia being more popular than ever, the rules need updated — starting with the credit owed to Will, Graham, and Larry.”
PlayStation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There are likely contractual reasons why Sony isn’t required to credit the original writers of Until Dawn in the movie version. But there’s no getting around how dubious that is in the first place. As pointed out on the petition page, Until Dawn has been a consequential part of PlayStation’s brand, so much so that it’s featured in the publishing arm’s MCU-style opening splash animation. Not all adaptations have done this. The 2024 flop Borderlands for example includes series creator Randy Pitchford as an executive producer in the film’s credit.
Simply put, there is no Until Dawn movie without the writers who helped make it a recognizable video game.
Sony Pictures
Simply put, there is no Until Dawn movie without the writers who helped make it a recognizable property worth bringing to a new medium. Not doing the simple courtesy of including their names in the film’s credits seems like an unnecessarily callous move, especially after it’s been brought to the public’s attention.
At a time when writing has been so heavily devalued, even as these popular works prop up profitable adaptations and the billion-dollar corporations that fund and distribute them, sparing three lines of credit to include the names crucial to an IP’s existence just feels like the right thing to do. As two decades of comic book movies have shown us, the actual minds behind some of the most successful films ever made have received little compensation for their work. With the tech sector’s obsession with normalizing artificial intelligence, this harmful Hollywood trend stands to get worse.
It’s already tricky that games aren’t as simple to attribute to their true creators, as some of the biggest video games are the result of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people’s collective work. But broadly listing the game’s publisher and developer as a catch-all for the adaptation is a disservice to the hours of creative work that goes into bringing parts of these interactive stories to life.
With video games becoming the next frontier for big Hollywood adaptations, it’s in developers’ and creators’ interest to set a different precedent from past as early as possible.
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