Inside ‘District 9’ Director Neill Blomkamp’s New Game

Director Neill Blomkamp is best known for his gritty, allegorical sci-fi films. There’s the alien apartheid District 9 (2009), working class and immigrant team-up Elysium (2013), and a look into the cyclical nature of crime in Chappie (2015). His movies create worlds that feel real, lived in, and now he’s turning his talents to the upcoming video game Off the Grid.

Rolling Stone recently spoke with the acclaimed director about his decision to step into game development and how his specific vision for politically minded science fiction is adapting to the challenges of a more interactive medium. Blomkamp immediately draws a clear distinction between the tenets of his work making movies and creating a game.

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“The most important thing in film — which is emotion and character — doesn’t really feature [in video games], unless you’re making something like The Last of Us,” Blomkamp tells Rolling Stone. “This is not that game.” 

What is Off the Grid?

Off the Grid is a 150-player cyberpunk battle royale with a 60-hour narrative campaign weaved in. That’s unusual, to say the least. Battle royales like Fortnite and Apex Legends or hero shooters like Overwatch 2 do have stories associated with them, but these are typically told via cinematics or in-game descriptions of items and characters, not told mid-game. Also, most games in the genre cap their matches at around 100 players, so 150 is a sizable increase.

Gunzilla Games is the independent studio behind the project and Blomkamp is the chief creative officer. He oversees the motion capture and is responsible for the overall aesthetic of the game, making sure everyone’s ideas are brought together coherently. 

On the surface, Off the Grid is most comparable to Elysium, Blomkamp’s dystopian film starring Matt Damon as a factory worker who dons an experimental exoskeleton to fight his way off Earth and onto a luxurious space station fitted with medical technology that can cure his cancer. Both in the actual mechanics of the game and the wider story themes you can feel the resemblance.

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“Elysium, or cybernetics in general, is unbelievably interesting,” Blomkamp says. “The game is built on this. It’s predicated on this idea of interchangeable cyber-limbs. The ability to switch them out during gameplay is one of the core structural elements of how the battle royale is played.”

Like Call of Duty: Warzone, Off the Grid features customizable loadouts. Gear up, choose your weapons, equipment, and robotic limbs that will give you different boons during a match, such as the ability to be invisible at range, drone deployment, white phosphorus rockets, and temporary superspeed. When you encounter another player, you can shoot off their cyber-limbs to steal them for yourself and then run away using their own legs. 

If that concept sounds daunting, it’s supposed to. “There’s a shitload of stuff happening in the game,” Blomkamp says. “Something more bare bones and stripped down, like Counter-Strike, my brain soaks that up quicker. I struggle to play this game at the level that a lot of the people inside the company can, switching out limbs and using the different attributes. It’s pretty fucking hardcore, so you’ve got to be good to be able to play it.”

How did it feel connected to the director’s previous work?

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and that’s by design. Unlike Blomkamp’s sci-fi films, which are mostly set in South Africa, Off the Grid takes aim at the U.S. The core aesthetic of OTG is satirically, purposefully, very American,” he says. “The narrative in the game references pretty much everything in the real world.” 

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The setting for the game, Teardrop Island, is a wasteland that was once at the mercy of three megacorporations who have since abandoned it and its residents. The theme of capitalism gone awry that can be found in his sci-fi films pervades the atmosphere of OTG, too.

Why the battle royale is taking place at all, Blomkamp is tight-lipped about, but a new video exclusively revealed to Rolling Stone offers an insight into the plight of the island’s residents.

The comparisons to modern-day America can be seen instantly. Turning to a life of crime to afford basic necessities like housing, medical care, and food is about as American as it gets. “At my core I am most interested in sociological studies of humankind, whatever that means,” Blomkamp says.

The clip begins with a woman named Missy on the hunt for an artificial organ, one she can sell to make a quick buck. The catch is it’s inside a person, so she needs to neutralize his guards and cut it out of him. Whether this is the kind of mission players will do in Off the Grid or just some set up as to how the world got the way it did remains to be seen, but it would be a fun take on the capture the flag match type.

While Blomkamp is keeping mum about most of the story, what we do know is that his long-time collaborator Sharlto Copley will be playing narrator Cobra; players will be guided through the 60-hour narrative campaign by him.

“What we’re doing with Sharl is building a motion capture studio in his garage,” Blomkamp explains, drawing on his well-known DIY filmmaking talents. Gunzilla is based in Frankfurt, Germany, while Copley lives in L.A.. “It’s a Viacom system that we’re building for him — he will have the ability to to just do stuff all the time.”

How is game development different from filmmaking?

While Off the Grid, and most video games, are made in absolute secrecy, Gunzilla’s independent nature allows for and seems to encourage out-of-the-box solutions like this. “There are no bosses, we do whatever we think we wanna do for the best product that we can make,” Blomkamp says.

Despite working with Copley and directing motion capture, making games is still a big shift from filmmaking, which Blomkamp notes is more director-centric. So why has he moved from a medium that’s all about him to one that requires more collaboration? He enjoys the different possibilities.

“Either the filmmaker or the game maker has a story and an emotional piece of information that they want to convey to you, or they are instead making a simulation of some kind that you can move through with 100 percent agency,” Blomkamp explains. 

He has big ideas about the future of what game experiences could be. “Think of a photoreal brain-computer interface matrix-like situation where you can rob banks or something,” he says. “That’s coming, and that’s player agency at the highest level. It would be like an adrenaline rush and a dopamine bonanza. But you’re not necessarily put on rails and guided towards things that the artisan who built it wants you to experience.”

Blomkamp insists that Off the Grid is going to be closer to the latter kind of game, a self-driven experience for players rather than something they’re directed through, and it’s a distinct kind of creative outlet for him. 

“Because I know films and storytelling in a linear sense, it’s the thing that I love the most, I would reserve game making for this more high fidelity simulation,” he says. “Open World, live environments, like a battle royale, is a good way to bring that to life. In some sense, because it does go back to my background in 3D graphics, and this feeling of building a place that you can experience, it’s super interesting.”

Is Blomkamp leaving Hollywood behind?

Off the Grid isn’t his first foray into the world of video games, either. He was “addicted” to Counter-Strike, and a big fan of single-player first-person shooter games like Half-Life (1998). He recently helmed Gran Turismo (2023), a biographical movie about Jann Mardenborough, a British teenager who won a Gran Turismo video game competition and was trained as a real racer. Blomkamp also shot a Halo short film, Landfall, in 2007, but a project for a feature film for the franchise fell through.

“It was studio politics,” he says wistfully. “It was a movie that was co-financed between Fox and Universal, and you also had Microsoft in the mix. It just became too top heavy. This happens in Hollywood all the time, it collapsed. I would have loved to have made that. Maybe I can make OTG into a film, it feels dense with ideas.”

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As for what’s next, Blomkamp has no plans to completely leave Hollywood. “I’m definitely moving into games long term, it’s not only OTG at Gunzilla,” he notes. “Making films is probably my primary outlet, [they’re] a very personal, director-centric art form, whereas games, you’re building an experience for players [and] you collaborate with a lot of people and all of you bring it to life. They’re both cool. But if I’m going to do something that’s personal and I’m trying to move people or make them think something, it’s probably going to be in film.”

While it appears we won’t be getting the same auteurial stamp on Off the Grid we get with some of Neill Blomkamp’s movies, it’s clear that what he’s getting out of the game as an artist is different to what fulfills him in filmmaking, and the sociological subject matter he shines a light on will still take center stage. He and Gunzilla have lofty ambitions for OTG, and only time will tell if they can make it stand out in an already saturated genre.