Celebrity Byte

Damon Lindelof: "[Lost] functions in a way as a role-playing game or a first-person shooter"

What else does the game offer?

DL: There are some amazing caverns and waterfalls and the black rock that you get to explore in great detail. The original pitch behind the game was like the early Star Wars RPGs, in which you're an original character going through the same events that were originally seen in the movies, or in this case the TV show, and you're seeing it from a different perspective and you're occasionally going to overlap with stories from the show. You play Eliott, a new character that's on board Oceanic Flight 815 who crashes on the island and has his own story, but he interacts with Locke and Hurley and Jack and other characters from the show.

What are your thoughts on what can be done in today's game consoles and how it's impacting Hollywood?

DL: When you look at games like BioShock, for example, where the mythology behind the game is almost as important as the game itself, so you're getting into this spirit of world creation. I think with Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, where you're hooked into the Internet, gameplay will become more episodic and you'll be able to download a new level every other week as the game goes on. Ultimately, a show like "Lost" will become a playable adventure as more television writers migrate into interactive media and vice versa.

DL: We wanted the game to be an island unto itself, pun intended. My gaming experience impacted the writing of the show long before Ubisoft came into the picture because the show functions in a way as a role-playing game or a first-person shooter.

Do you see a lot of gamers gravitating to your TV show?

We think the writing of "Lost" is like a first-person shooter. Each season is like a board reset. You're introduced to new characters, you have new adventures, you explore new places on the island, and yet the some of the circumstances remains the same. They're trying to get off the island and survive and make alliances. The audiences who has come to accept the complexity of videogames, that audience embraced "Lost," which because it was so complex no one thought would succeed as a TV show.

Would a videogame version of "Lost" be an option one day when the sixth season is over and the mother ship has landed?

Watch out for Lost, Season Seven: Island of the Dead

CC: Damon and I do a regular pod cast about the show and we've joked a lot about how if there was a season seven it'd have to be the zombie season, so maybe we'd make a zombie game.

DL: That's a great idea, because the problem has always been that the game is not a first-person shooter. That is to say, there's not a lot of action and adventure inherent in the game, and Ubisoft realized this when creating their game. But once you have zombies on the island, there'd be a lot of stuff to shoot at.

So it'd be like House of the Dead?

DL: Yeah, there you go, Island of the Dead.