Until Dawn Video Game Writers Not Credited in the Movie, and They’re Not Happy About It
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The horror game Until Dawn, which was re-released last year, recently got a movie adaptation that was released on April 25,. While that should have been good news for the franchise, it managed to cause a bit of a stir as the writers of the original game were not included in the film’s credits.
Though the film introduces a new cast, it has been criticized for not crediting the original writers, Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick. Despite their significant contributions—writing over 10,000 pages of script for the game—they were left out of the film’s credits.
Petition Launched to Credit Until Dawn Writers in Movie Adaptation
The writers expressed their disappointment at not being credited. They pointed out that video game creators often go unrecognized in movie adaptations, noting that the Writers’ Guild doesn’t have a system to credit them.
“I didn’t assume anything, but I thought somebody would have bothered to throw in our names, even during the end credits,” Fessenden says. “But there’s no courtesy in show biz. This is one of those situations where credit is clear, but because the Guild doesn’t know who to ascribe credit [for video games] in general, they don’t have a hard and fast rule about how to do that,”
Kim MacAskill, a former narrative director for Sony, also criticized the exclusion of the game’s creators on her Linkedin. In additon, she launched a petition demanding that Sony revise the film’s credits to honor the game’s writers.
MacAskill explained that the creators of Until Dawn spent years developing the game and deserved recognition. She questioned why Sony would credit the team behind HBO’s The Last of Us series, which acknowledged both the studio and Neil Druckmann, while Until Dawn’s creators were left out.
MacAskill has called for a change in how intellectual property crediting is handled in transmedia adaptations, hoping for better acknowledgment of creators’ contributions.
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