Eloise Singer and Lucy Liu on Bringing ‘The Pirate Queen’ to Life in VR

What if I told you the most powerful pirate in history was a woman? That’s exactly what Singer Studios decided to do when it started production on The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend. The Pirate Queen was meant to be a film that tells the story of how the wife of a pirate became the leader of a massive fleet and even implemented some of the first ideas of gender equality into law.

With the release in the rearview mirror, CGMagazine was able to sit down with Singer Studios Director Eloise Singer and Executive Producer/Lead Actress Lucy Liu to talk about all things The Pirate Queen: A Forgotten Legend, the power of women, the importance of storytelling and the difficulties of going from producing film to VR game production.

So, you both have a lot of experience in film and television, but this is the first time Singer Studios has made a video game. What made you guys say, ‘Hey, let’s do VR’?

Singer: That’s a very good question. So actually, we started it initially as a film, and so we were developing The Pirate Queen as a film. A friend of mine told me about the story, and she said; Did you know that the most powerful pirate in history was a woman? At first, I didn’t believe her, and the more I looked into it, the more fascinated I was with her story.

The fact that not only was she the most powerful pirate in history, and she commanded 70,000 men during the lead-up to the Opium Wars, but she paved the way for gender equality, and she literally created a code of laws that meant that men and women had to be treated equally.

So when we first started developing it, we started it as a film. But because of the pandemic, we couldn’t, and we didn’t know what the future of the industry was going to be. So I thought we had to tell the story. We need to find a way to tell the story because it’s so important. If I were a kid growing up, I would think so differently about gender roles and gender dynamics if I knew that a female was the most powerful pirate in history.

So we then reached out to a friend of mine who used to be the head of PlayStation Studios in London, and a guy called Dr. Dave Ranyard. And I called Dave and said, Listen, what if we made The Pirate Queen into a game, it’d be amazing. We could have it so that you could row through treacherous waters, you could climb up the side of pirate ships, you could explore moonlit cabins, like it’s such an amazing experience.

So, from that, we decided that it would be so cool in VR because it’s the only way in history or it’s the only way that you can step back into history and explore a time and a place that doesn’t exist in real life. There’s no better way to do it than in VR.

Read the whole interview here.