Knives Out, Infocom Games, and L.A. Noire: Rian Johnson on the Inspiration Behind Poker Face
The new Peacock mystery series Poker Face premieres January 26, and Executive Producer Rian Johnson has revealed which classic video games helped inspire the show and his career in general.
Poker Face stars Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, who travels the country and solves mysteries thanks to her innate ability to tell if someone is lying. Johnson created the show with Lyonne and serves as both a writer and director of several episodes.
Natasha Lyonne stars as Charlie Cale in Peacock's Poker Face.
“When I was a teenager, the computer games I was playing were Infocom games. And those were the text-based adventures like Zork and Planetfall,” Johnson says of a pair of games that contained no graphics or images, just a series of prompts where the player would type in commands to keep the story going.
“It would literally just be text,” Johnson says, “and would describe the room. And you'd type in ‘open the mailbox’ and you (would) open the mailbox.”
The fact that Johson is a fan of some decades-old classics should come as no surprise. In fact, he even snuck in a reference to Zork in The Last Jedi.
But those weren’t the only classic games that have been pivotal in Johnson’s creative process. More specific to the origins of Poker Face, which he describes as a “howcatchem” instead of a “whodunnit,” Johnson says a different kind of old-school game may have influenced him.
“There was one called Deadline,” he says of the 40 year old Infocom mystery. “That kind of went a long way along with all of this other stuff I was absorbing.”
Johnson also admits that growing up he was a fan of Sierra On-Line’s 1989 game The Colonel’s Bequest and later Rockstar’s L.A. Noire.
Johnson says games like L.A. Noire influenced his career.
“Any time games
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