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Image via Warhorse Studios
Daniel Vavra, director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel, is stepping away from game development.
The news comes from CzechCrunch after speaking to studio boss Martin Frývaldský. The creative director will no longer be involved in development at Warhorse Studios, culminating a 14-year tenure.
According to the studio boss (via Google Translate), Vávra wanted to “move on,” adding that he had been wanting to try something different for a long time. “You won’t see him in the office every day anymore, but in a broader sense he is still part of Warhorse.”
That something new is a film adaptation of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Vávra and Frývaldský are working on getting it onto “the screen or the big screen,” and there’s already a draft script for it.
“We feel the interest from the film world, negotiations are already underway,” the studio boss said. “We don’t just want to sell the rights, we want the film to be what we imagine it to be.”
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As CzechCrunch reports, the film project goes in tandem with an organizational transformation of the company, which now has almost three hundred employees. Viktor Bocan and Prokop Jirsa are now creative directors responsible for game development, with Frývaldský and Martin Klím being joined by Victor Höschl as art director and Martin Štýs as CTO.
In terms of goals and ambitions, Frývaldský said it is important for the studio to reach “a similar audience as the game,” whether with a film or a series. This means the United States, Western Europe, and Asia.
“We would have to be blind if we didn’t realize how much our brand has grown,” the studio boss added. “In fact, Vávra’s new position could be called transmedia director. In any case, we see the film as a complement to our game creation, which can be extremely successful in its own right.”
Last week, Embracer Group, the conglomerate that owns Kingdom Come: Deliverance publisher Deep Silver, shared the milestone that the sequel sold five million copies within its first year.
About the Author
Contributing Editor, News, GameDeveloper.com
Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist and critic from Argentina. Video games helped him to learn English, so now he covers them for places like The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and more. He also runs Into the Spine, a site dedicated to fostering and supporting new writers, and co-hosted Turnabout Breakdown, a podcast about the Ace Attorney series. He’s most likely playing a rhythm game as you read this.
