“I had to learn the game, master it and write the book – all in three months,” said Dietz, laughing. “It was kind of crazy.”
But the result, Halo: The Flood, was a smash hit, selling more than 1 million copies and, along with Eric Nylund’s 2001 book Halo: The Fall of Reach, fueled a major boom in video game novels . Soon the term “transmedia” – telling a story across multiple platforms – became a major buzzword throughout the publishing industry, and it became standard for Triple-A game releases to feature an accompanying book series.
“Some people don’t think books with ties are cool,” said Dietz, who went on to write novels based on other video game series like Mass Effect, Hitman, and Resistance. “But I think they’re a lot of fun — and I’m still proud of them.”
In recent years, streaming platforms have jumped on the transmedia bandwagon and adapted video game IP at a rapid pace. Paramount Plus’ Halo series and Netflix’s Resident Evil series were released this year, and there are plans to produce shows based on Assassin’s Creed, Fallout, God of War and The Last of Us, among others based.
But while video game IP is seemingly hotter than ever, literary connections – which have become so common over the past 20 years – face a more uncertain future: Authors say the number of video game novels has noticeably dwindled.
“The market is shrinking,” Dietz said, adding that it’s been many years since he received an offer to write one.
Part of the problem, he said, is that people are reading less: Despite the publishing industry making record profits during the pandemic, Dietz cites a Gallup poll from early 2022 that found Americans read two or three fewer books a year than earlier between 2001 and 2016.
Author Brian Evenson, who has written a number of video game ties throughout his career, has also noted a decline.
“In those early days — the Halo days — there were just so many video game novels, and that’s certainly slowed down,” he said. Evensen also noted that he was particularly surprised that narrative-heavy franchises like The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption chose not to pursue novels.
For Kari Snyder, a professor of digital media at the University of Houston who specializes in transmedia, shifting the focus to TV adaptations is a logical next step for video game IP and reflects how people consume media.
“If we just look at the trends in communication, video is skyrocketing and everything tends to be,” she said. “The reason streaming is the choice of choice is solely because audiences have moved there.”
Book publishing and video games have always been odd bedfellows, according to Eric Raab, a former senior editor at Tor Books who later worked for Bungie, the original developer of Halo. In the early 2000s, he said, many publishing executives, notoriously old-fashioned and traditional, dismissed video games as a niche hobby. Meanwhile, game designers – many without dedicated writers on staff – often treated storyline and world building as secondary aspects of the development process.
“But after the success of the Halo books, we all knew that this had a lot of potential,” Raab said.
Each project proved to be a significant gamble, however, and Raab points to Perfect Dark Zero, a 2005 Xbox 360 title, as a title that didn’t pay off. Hoping to repeat the success of Halo and its companion novels, Microsoft signed a multi-book deal with Tor, one of the most well-known sci-fi and fantasy imprints, and brought in award-winning author Greg Rucka to lead the project . But when the game was released to modest reviews and underwhelming sales, the book series fizzled out.
Because plots were often completed in the later stages of a game’s development cycle, novels had to be written quickly thereafter to coincide with their release and “ride the video game’s publicity,” Raab explained. “It was a lot of work and you just never knew when a game was going to start or not.”
According to Mat Piscatella, a video game industry analyst at research firm NPD Group, the unpredictability of the market has historically made it difficult to license video games for other media, including books. Unlike Star Wars — a franchise that seems to have sustained success across all of its licensed media — and other well-known IPs in television and film, modern video games regularly fall in popularity, sometimes suddenly.
“You’re placing a bet that when a certain game comes out, it will generate enough interest to get your novel going,” Piscatella said. “You can have the best IP in the world, but if you miss just one game, everything could go wrong.”
He cites the Dead Space series as a notable example: when the third game in the series received mediocre reviews, the franchise quickly lost momentum and the corresponding book series dried up.
The sudden drop in popularity caught Evenson, who authored two of the Dead Space novels, by surprise.
“Dead Space games were pretty groundbreaking, and these books were a joy to write,” he said. “But then it sort of…disappeared.”
It’s not all doom and gloom for video game literature. Although the volume of novels has slowed, some of the more established gaming franchises, including Halo and Gears of War, continue to publish new books. In fact, a recent NPD study shows that Halo is one of the best-selling book franchises in the second quarter of this year — the only video game IP in the top 10. Author Kelly Gay, who led the recently released Halo: The Rubicon Protocol, is the enduring literary The game’s success stems from the IP’s long-term commitment to novels and world-building.
“There’s so much content and depth in this place,” she said. “You feel like this is a universe that could possibly exist.”
Additionally, Blizzard Entertainment established its own publishing division in 2016 (Evenson contributed to a Diablo short story collection due out this fall). And outside of Triple-A titles, the meteoric rise of self-publishing in recent years has helped some smaller game developers pursue literary ties: The designers of the indie horror game Five Nights at Freddie’s, for example, published a self-published novel , based on the game in 2015, which prompted publishers Scholastic to release two sequels later.
But the rise of online multiplayer games like “Fortnite” and “Roblox” — where players essentially create their own stories — has added new complications to the already precarious release pipeline in recent years.
“These massively multiplayer games could have hundreds of millions of registered players, but they don’t focus on a unified storyline or single character like Master Chief,” Dietz said. “It makes it quite difficult to make connections – and as far as I know, there haven’t been any ‘Fortnite’ novels before.”
But single-player narratives with deep, fleshed-out worlds might be due for a resurgence. Piscatella points to the surprising success of The Elden Ring – which A Game of Thrones author George RR Martin helped tell the tale – as a sign that the literary world could still play a major role in the future of gaming.
“There will be many lessons from this game, and one of them will be this: your world building needs to be super sharp and polished and have a guiding narrative,” he said. “And who better to tell stories like that than real storytellers, right?”
As for Evenson, he’s optimistic that game developers will recognize the value that literature could bring to new franchises, and that the success of recent TV adaptations could even breathe new life into novels. He notes that each type of media — whether it’s a game, a book, or a TV show — can bring different elements to the table, and he hopes that certain individuals within gaming will see these opportunities from the very beginning when they launch new IPs design.
“We saw how it was done bit by bit, always as an afterthought,” he said. “The game is great, so let’s do a novel or a TV show quickly. But we’re going to get to a point where people are going to create all of these things at once – and that could very well change the whole way we think about narrative. In my opinion, the potential here is still enormous.”