Vince Gilligan Is Cooking Up A 'Breaking Bad' VR Experience
We're still in the midst of the Peak TV era, and while our television screens are practically bursting with a multitude of fantastic new television shows seemingly every day, one show still stands above the rest for me. I consider Breaking Bad to be a major contender for the title of the greatest television show of all time. But as much as I love it, I'm hesitant about ever seeing a revival of the series; I'd much rather see something like Better Call Saul, a spin-off set in the same universe that's allowed to carve out its own identity.
But a virtual reality experience? That's a different story. Now we have word that showrunner Vince Gilligan is developing a piece of VR storytelling that might continue the saga of drug kingpin Walter White and the tormented Jesse Pinkman. Read everything we know about the Breaking Bad VR experience below.
Variety brings word about the new VR property, but specific details are still scarce at this stage. We don't know if stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are going to be involved at all (though one has to assume they will be), but we do know that the final product won't be a virtual reality game; instead, it'll be a passive "experience" designed to immerse you in the world of the show. Here's another key thing to note about it:
Because production tools for live-action 360 video are still primitive, the experience will be assembled using computer graphics and Sony's game team will work with Gilligan to realize his vision.
So this will be an entirely CG-fueled experience. Still, Gilligan sounds like he's intrigued by the possibilities. Sony gathered a group of showrunners they've worked with (Breaking Bad was a Sony property), including Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore, to give them a showcase of what's possible with PlayStation's VR technology at the moment. It was Gilligan who reacted most positively to what he saw, and said he was interested in experimenting with the format.
Having sampled a few VR games and experiences over the past couple of years, I can easily imagine the Breaking Bad VR experience as something that drops you into the show's infamous RV with Walt and Jesse, allowing you to be a fly on the wall during an unseen moment in the middle of the show's timeline as we watch the two interact and cook meth in the middle of the desert. But why stop there? If this is going to be a CG experience anyway, they could go as far as to put the viewer into the perspective of an actual fly on the wall: perhaps the one from the Rian Johnson-directed bottle episode "Fly" that saw Cranston's Walter White losing his cool about an insect that was contaminating Gus Fring's secret underground laboratory.
What would you like to see in a Breaking Bad VR experience? Would you want to be a passenger in Jesse's car as he speeds away during the finale, or one of the cops who breaks in and finds Walt lying on the floor of Uncle Jack's compound? Let us know below.