The lovable indie game hit Oxenfree showed in 2016 that you don’t have to work for a large media company to become a successful game maker. Sean Krankel and his cousin Adam Hines had shaken off the yoke of the big multinationals they worked for to start their own business. They rented a small office building in California and started Night School: a game studio that was supposed to make smaller, narrative games. Their debut was Oxenfreean intimate story in which you as a teenage girl Alex sail with friends to an island to secretly party.
On that island, Alex comes into contact with a mysterious force that causes her to relive the same night over and over again. You gradually learn what everyone in the group is thinking about and what their problems are, so that you can solve them when the evening starts again. A story with a sci-fi layer, which ultimately mainly revolves around what drives the vulnerable characters and the difficult choices that result from that. Because what do you have to say to keep everyone friendly?
Oxenfree became quite a success, with rave reviews and one and a half million copies sold in the first three years. Not a huge figure for large studios, but a smaller company can keep its head above water for a long time with such sales. The sequel is now about to be released, but something unexpected also happened: Hines and Krankel work for a large multinational again.
Acquisition by Netflix
Night School negotiated with Netflix in 2021 to offer their first game through the Netflix app. Netflix is increasingly investing in games, which are offered to customers as part of the subscription. “At the end of a meeting, they asked us if we could hang around for a few more minutes,” says Krankel. “I thought then that they would call off the deal. Instead, they asked if we wanted to join them.”
Night School and Netflix seem like a logical match. Their games are story oriented, the gameplay relies on conversations between characters. They also made cross-media productions, such as an adventure game that followed up on a TV series mr. Robot. Hines also worked at Disney, and Krankel produced games at game studio Telltale that are very similar in design to multi-episode TV seasons.
Night School is the first game studio to acquire Netflix. According to Krankel, little has really changed since then. “Netflix interferes little with us and mainly tries to strengthen us. We now suddenly have access to marketing teams and recording equipment. When making trailers, we now work together with people who also make trailers for films and series.” Netflix also helped Oxenfree in thirty languages.
It remains to be seen how autonomous Night School will remain. Netflix’s game strategy is still in its infancy: the company is mainly concerned with growing and investing, a phase in which companies are only being bought. The strategy will only be tightened up at a later date. Night School was additionally purchased when developing Oxen free 2 was almost completed, leaving the streaming service with little to say about the content of the game. Perhaps the streaming service is more involved with future games, but Krankel keeps tight lips. “We would like to share a lot, but we are not doing that yet.”
Collage of stories
Making a sequel to Oxenfree turned out to be a challenge. In the first game, you actually played a time traveler, reliving the adventure over and over again. Each completed session had its own ending, allowing the player to decide for themselves what they thought was the best ending. “We now had to choose one ending on which the sequel builds,” says Hines, who again wrote the script. “But we also found a way to jokingly refer to all the other endings.”
The new part takes place five years after the previous game, this time with a 32-year-old woman in the lead role. She must discover where the mysterious radio signals come from on the island Alex had previously visited. Hines: “The cast is a lot older now, but they have similar problems. In the end, everything goes wrong, which holds up a mirror to the characters. They face themselves.”
Again, the game does not have one ending, but several. “There are three main storylines towards the end, but I prefer to think of it as a collage of possible endings,” says director Bryant Cannon. „Oxen free 1 had about 100 to 200 possible endings, with little details that are always different. There are even more in it Oxen free 2.”
Oxenfree 2 will be released July 12 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, PC, Android and iOS. The mobile versions are also available in the Netflix app.