Halfway through its first season, Apple’s Mythic Quest threw a wild curveball with “A Dark Quiet Death” — an unexpectedly dramatic episode that chronicled the rise and fall of another video game development team. “A Dark Quiet Death” was the first instance of Mythic Quest switching up its comedic formula to tell an earnest story about what makes people fall in love with games. And since then, every season of Mythic Quest has featured a backstory episode that felt emblematic of the series’ narrative strengths.
Side Quest, Apple TV Plus’ new Mythic Quest spinoff miniseries, feels a lot like a collection of “A Dark Quiet Death”-style episodes as it introduces a slew of new characters (and brings back a couple of veterans) whose lives have all been touched by one of the world’s most popular games. When I recently spoke with Side Quest’s co-creators, Ashly Burch, John Howell Harris, and Katie McElhenney, they told me that the new show’s stylistic similarities to Mythic Quest’s forays into the past were entirely intentional. But after years of focusing on characters who see themselves as larger-than-life gods, the Side Quest team was much more interested in telling stories about the players who made Mythic Quest a hit.
“When we first started writing Mythic Quest, we talked about how these characters are sort of like gods who are creating this virtual world,” Burch said. “So if the people within Mythic Quest HQ are the gods, then Side Quest is about the mortals that are being affected by the choices of the gods.”
Side Quest wanders further and further away from Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney) and everyone else working at Mythic Quest Studios over the course of its four-episode-long season. But the series actually kicks off with an episode revolving around the game’s art director, Phil Birch (Derek Waters), as he tries to make some time for a vacation with his girlfriend Maude (Anna Konkle). Even though working directly on Mythic Quest (the game) might make its fans see Phil as one of the game’s gods, Burch felt that his history of being exploited by his colleagues made him the perfect mortal to open the show.
“We wanted to lead with a transitional landing pad between Mythic Quest prime and Side Quest, and we thought that Phil, bless him, is a very good encapsulation of the choices Mythic Quest’s main characters have been making,” Burch explained. “From seasons 2–3, Phil is probably treated like the office toilet more than any other character, and he’s just at the whims of these deranged creatives.”
All of Side Quest’s characters have some sort of relationship with Mythic Quest, but the co-creators saw the show as an opportunity to explore different kinds of audiences that can gravitate toward popular pieces of IP as they expand into different mediums. At this point in the game’s existence, Mythic Quest has been adapted into a hit comic series that stores like the one featured in “Pull List” can barely manage to keep in stock. And while Mythic Quest employees like Phil might be desperate to get away from the franchise, Harris noted that there are countless people who are desperate to become part of it, like the professional musicians featured in Side Quest’s Tár-like episode, “Fugue.”
“At one point, it was news to me that the music from games like Zelda and Final Fantasy goes on tour all around the world to be played by full orchestras in concert halls and theaters packed full of people,” Harris said. “I was fascinated by how popular these concerts are, but also the level of musicianship required to play at that level in such a competitive environment.”
Image: Apple
The season comes full circle in “The Last Raid,” an episode set almost entirely within Mythic Quest (the game), as a group of teens log on together hoping to take on some powerful bosses only to realize that their real-world friendships are running low on HP. Burch said “The Last Raid” was born, in part, out of the team’s love for classic machinima series like Red vs. Blue. But the idea of taking viewers inside of Mythic Quest also struck them as the perfect way to illustrate how both the game and the larger brand have transformed in response to what’s been going on behind the scenes.
“Part of what’s interesting about ‘The Last Raid’ is the way you kind of see that Mythic Quest, the game, is changing because the brand is also expanding,” McElhenney said. “It almost feels like this group of kids is playing a throwback version of Mythic Quest. World of Warcraft is a good analogue because it’s a similar situation where you have a game that has a rabid fan base of people who are loyal to it even though it’s not necessarily being updated and maintained.”
Though Side Quest drops a couple of hints about how Mythic Quest might change after its season 4 finale, the team’s biggest goal with the spinoff was to leave viewers guessing about which kinds of new perspectives they’d be seeing this world from next. And that meant leaning into the tonal flexibility the original series has become known for by veering off the beaten path.
“I feel like that’s how it was with Mythic Quest’s departure episodes — especially in season 1 when no one was expecting them,” McElhenney said. “Shows just don’t do that kind of thing usually, but because Mythic Quest prime was able to take that leap, we had more creative freedom with Side Quest to embrace the anthology model and make every episode feel completely different.”
All four episodes of Side Quest are now streaming on Apple TV Plus.
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