Do the Game: 10 Chambers’ dev documentary, five years in the making

Want to know how Den of Wolves was made? Season 1 will take you to last year's TGAs.

In addition to spending the last five years developing Den of Wolves, 10 Chambers has been hard at work on a behind-the-scenes documentary all about its production. Titled Do the Game, it’s the brainchild of 10 Chambers co-founder and chief strategy officer, Oscar J-T Holm.

Before we get to the doco, though, we need to spend just a second or two focusing on Holm. Starting out his career as a model, it’s an understatement to say that Holm transitioned to become an entrepreneur. He’s the driving force behind liquor brands such as Martin Miller’s Gin, Pölstar Vodka, and Reyka Vodka. More impressively, he had a hand in The Halcyon Company, the company that bought The Terminator IP in 2007.

While Halcyon oversaw both Terminator Salvation in its film and video game forms, Holm himself headed production of the video game. Perhaps it’s here that he saw the potential in tying games and film together.

When I spoke to Holm in mid-March, he was able to confirm that most of the production on Do the Game Season 1 was complete; eight episodes of 30 minutes each are planned, and work on Season 2 is also underway. Season 1 will focus on Den of Wolves‘ creation and conclude at the game’s big reveal at The Game Awards 2024, while Season 2 will likely take us up to the point of Den of Wolves‘ as yet unannounced early access release.

While Holm asserted that he was “in discussion with several Hollywood streaming services” to feature on a major streaming platform, nothing as yet has been announced at the time of writing.

“This was always a conscious decision from day one of development,” Holm said, detailing how the project came to be. “I spoke to Ulf [Andersson] and suggested this idea. If nothing else, it’s a great memory [for 10 Chambers]”.

“I said to him, ‘if we’re going to do this, it’s not an advertisement’,” Holm continued. “We’re going to be a 100% honest. It’s sometimes awkward; you could be in a dispute with someone, or it’s a sensitive thing, or maybe you’ve had a bad day because of your personal life, or whatever. It’s not always comfortable.”

Holm said Do the Game had a big learning curve attached to its first year.

“The first year was a lot more shielded,” he admitted. “We recently screened the first four episodes in a cinema in Stockholm for the whole company area. I think people started to realise that the goal with this production is not to put anyone in a really bad spot, but to showcase the difficulties that we go through as part of the creative process.”

Citing numerous gaming documentaries that he considered did it wrong or did it right, Holm said that Do the Game is trying to be more commercial and more appealing to general audiences.

“It’s a faster pace; I find a lot of [other documentaries] very, very slow,” Holm said. “You have 4.6 billion people playing video games, and then you have people that know absolutely nothing about them. If you take The Game Awards for example, at 154 million live viewers, it’s comparable with a Super Bowl, but no one has heard of it.

“It’s such a dislocated thing; video games are now bigger than movies and music combined,” Holm said. “I wanted to make this as a bridge to showcase video games.”

Get a taste of what to expect from the documentary thanks to a teaser trailer, above.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more of Do the Game. Den of Wolves is planned for (an undated) release on Windows PC via Steam, and will head to PS5 and Xbox Series S & X following that.

Steve Wright of Stevivor was flown to Tokyo, Japan for the purposes of this hands-on preview. Flights, accommodation, and two nights’ worth of dinners were paid for by 10 Chambers.