My latest book – Life Is Strange: Welcome to Blackwell Academy – comes out today in the USA. (The UK has to wait until October 30 instead.) It’s based on the hit video game series, Life Is Strange, developed by Dontnod and (in the case of the prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm) Deck Nine.
As it says in the official description:
An atmospheric and characterful look at the world of the hugely successful video game Life is Strange, through the eyes of Max and Chloe.
Welcome to Blackwell Academy is an in-universe book from the Life is Strange video game franchise from Dontnod Entertainment and Square Enix. This detailed book takes the form of a student guide to Blackwell Academy and the town of Arcadia Bay. Overlaid onto the pages is graffiti: notes, doodles, sketches and photographs from the Blackwell students themselves, including contributions from the beloved protagonists Max and Chloe.
Welcome to Blackwell Academy includes information on the staff and facilities of Blackwell Academy, the people and locations of Arcadia Bay, overlaid with funny, irreverent and poignant comments from the students.
I had played a little bit of Life Is Strange before Matt Ralphs at Titan Books approached me about working on it, but my kids – particular Marty and Pat – are huge fans of the series. I mean, they LOVE the games, and their passion for the series inspired me to dive deep into it for the book. They coached me through playing through every bit of both Life Is Strange and Before the Storm and debated all sorts of contentious bits about the games with me, helping me clarify things in my mind as I tried to figure out what it would be like to live inside the world of the games.
Pat even took dozens of screenshots from the games for the book, earning him his first publishing credit at the age of 16. He saved me countless hours and did a much better job at it than I could have managed.
It’s an unusual book in many ways.
- It’s an in-game artifact, something that’s supposedly plucked from the game’s universe just before the climactic moments at the end of the final episode of Life Is Strange.
- It’s a flip book. You read it Welcome to Blackwell Academy about three quarters through and then flip it over to read Welcome to Arcadia Bay.
- The original parts of the book are authentic replicas of a standard prep-school guide book and small-town guidebook.
- But then the characters from the book got a hold of it and scribbled all over the damn thing.
- Max and Chloe (the main characters from Life Is Strange) do most of the scribbling and doodling, bantering with each other with their pens, but a bunch of other characters chip in too.
- There’s a lot of swearing in the book. Like on every page and at maximum volume. You’ve been warned. (Or amused. Either way, go with it.)
- It’s a thick hardcover book that comes shrink-wrapped with a white band of paper around it, which you can see in the picture above. You remove the band, and it’s like you’re carrying around the actual artifact – although a little less worn, perhaps.
I had a ball working on this book, and not just because I got to play video games for days on end and call it research. My editor, Matt Ralphs, was fantastic fun to work with. He and I riffed up so many incredible ideas that made their way into the book, and he provided a strong guiding hand through it all.
The folks at Amazing15 provided the book’s stunning graphic design. That’s complicated as hell in a book like this – one with several layers, plus notes from me like “turn these bits of trivia into infographics” – and they made it look seamlessly easy.
So, huge thanks to them, plus also to the teams at Dontnod and Deck Nine. Particularly Jean-Luc Cano, Raoul Barbet, Michel Koch, Christian Devine, Webb Pickersgill, Chris Floyd, and Zak Garriss, who led the creative charge. Without them, we wouldn’t have a Life Is Strange world to set the book in at all.
I hope you enjoy this fun tome we came up with. It was borne of a wonderful game about friendships, family, and love – with a bit of supernatural drama thrown in – and inspired everyone who worked on it to love that world just as much as Chloe and Max love each other. With luck, that shines through.
I encourage you to ding your copy around. To tote it around in a backpack, drop it, scuff it, and maybe even write in it yourself. And swear in it as much as you like.
For authenticity.
