For a horror writer and icon of the video gaming world, Matt Costello is not the shy, baby-faced nerd you would expect. Captivating a roomful of gaming enthusiasts and horror readers during an interview at the Sydney Writer’s Festival, the sixty year old bounces about his seat, telling jokes and charming his audience. His passion for video games is more reminiscent of a teenage boy than his aging father, and soon the audience is swept up by his boyish charm.

As the writer and developer of some of the world's best selling video games, novels and television series, Costello has revolutionised the gaming world with his special brand of horror-inspired adventure. With the incredibly popular game 7th Guest released in 1992, Costello changed the face of video gaming with it’s innovative adult-targeted story-line, exciting new graphics and was one of first to feature a complex story-line unfolding from the perspective of the player. Released on the then-new CD-Rom technology, it inspired millions of people to buy brand-new computers just to play the game.

His next book Doom 3 soon became a hit video game, and an instant classic. It was not only teenage boys, but adults of all walks of life, who locked themselves away in their bedrooms, playing out this alternative universes. Game-writing, he explains, eyes gleaming with excitement, is dependent on your ability to construct a whole new dimension for players to play out their deepest fantasies. “Any universe can exist,” he states. “If we can think of it, according to the laws of quantum physics, it can exist.” Costello’s success, it seems, is due to his limitless gift for imagining exciting paranormal worlds.

“Game and story have to intersect and work together,” he says. The problem with many games is that writers are brought onto the project long after the decisions have been made, and end up being lacklustre and unexciting. Successful video games respect their audience by having “real characters, real story and real sense that you can control their world.”

Costello admits his own obsession with horror is a product of his troubled childhood. Like many gamers, his traumatic family life forced him to become “completely immersed in fantasy” as an escape from the more real horrors at home. Thus, the genius of writing comes naturally. “I’m afraid to say it’s not work but it doesn’t feel like it most of the time,” he says. “It’s more like it possesses you that you possessing it.”

He argues that the method of storytelling is changing as the next breed of writers comes to the fore. “Generation… what are we up to now? X? Y?” he asks the audience. For this new breed of storytellers, “games are getting more compelling, more involving.” Their understanding of multimedia will result in a different approach to the art of gaming, and Costello for one is excited about the possibilities.

Games are not just for kids, he maintains. Content is maturing, and with more emotion, adults are increasingly becoming more involved in the gaming world. “My son played every game built until 20, and then stopped. Games just didn’t interest him anymore. That is going to change.”

Thumbnail photo courtesy of WiseAcre, Creative Commons
Photo above courtesy of Shapeshift, Creative Commons