Side Quest’s creators wanted to tell stories about why people love games

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 …

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