With the series finale of Sons of Anarchy still fresh in our minds, the release of its IOS game counterpart doesn't stray much farther past the guns, sex, and high-octane panache of the show.

Kurt Sutter has released Sons of Anarchy: The Prospect onto the mobile (and soon to be PC) market and its a return to form.IGN had a chance to talk with Sutter about the new entry in his highly praised IP. Read on for details on how he approached the development of the game and the subsequent storytelling in its 10-episode arc.

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I’d been in this process for a while meaning that I’d been trying to get a game up and running for a few years now. And I’ve documented a lot of my frustrations via social media but it was an education for me, just to backtrack for a bit. It was an education for me. I’m a gamer and I knew the nuts and bolts of what was involved but trying to get off the ground, initially as a platform property and realizing all the complications and quite honestly just the expense of doing that and the time of doing that.We had a couple false starts and then ultimately we started running out of time if we wanted to get it out at any point near the end of the series, which is what we wanted. I had avoided platform games up until that point, mobile devices, and browser games. I just felt like they were kind of weak and ultimately, I’d rather do nothing than do something sh***y. Then, obviously as iOS games got more sophisticated and the quality of the graphics of tablets sort of getting comparable to that of platform and PCs, I was sort of reeducated as to that and we had Orpheus come in and pitch their concept of what the games look like and really just following the trend that so much of gaming is shifting into the table world. So I was sort of reeducated with all that and we signed off on it and really liked their enthusiasm and their ideas behind it. So that was the first piece of it for me was a little bit of education of what that entails.Then, the process of development was really about taking their pitch and their ideas and then my whole sort of mandate was two things really. One is I wanted to protect the mythology that was already out there and not have anything that contradict, or potentially if we ever do a prequel, I didn’t want to do anything that would smash into any narrative that we may want to use.So the first for me was about protecting the mythology that exists and then it really was about story. I didn’t want it just to be download and ride a bike and club somebody. Not that there’s not some of that involved but I wanted it to be story driven and character driven. Then, I put one of my writers here, Roberta, in the drivers seat with Orpheus and really guided them in terms of the mythology and then I would sign off on the bigger arcs and the character stuff. Then, the complete opposite of what it was like trying to get a platform game off the ground, then it moved very quickly. That was sort of how it all came to be. We wanted it a little bit earlier but then we had some parameters from Apple that we wanted to fulfill so it took a while even after it was ready to go but I’m really pleased with the way it turned out.

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I think so. For me, we obviously, in the vein of RPGs, wanted to use the system that best set up story. I think some of the blow back in terms of the game, initially with people was they felt it was too slow and there were too many decisions to be made. Again, I didn’t want it to be like you get into it and it’s just you know simple and kind of thin story and you’re just into the action of it all. Orpheus came up with a great way to weave action into all the storytelling elements. I wanted it to hearken back to some of those character choices that Jax had to make so that there was that sense of right and wrong and how much weight do I give my own sense of morality? How much weight do I give my devotion to the club?So I think those RPG devices in terms of making those decisions to find out who you are was really important in this first episode. And then I think, as you get into future episodes with some of those choices that are already made, and you've sort of determined the path that you’re on, there’s less of those and the game moves more quickly. But the thing I dig about it is that ultimately, it all comes full circle so none of these choices are just arbitrary decisions to manipulate game play. They all sort of come full circle back to story, so that the choices that you make in the first 30 seconds of the game comes all the way back, full circle at the end of the game. And that I think is a really cool hook that they’ve done well.You get sucked in and the thing that I dig is it wasn’t so much about making those decisions from an external point of view, in terms of am I a prospect? Am I a VP? What kind of Bike do I ride? It wasn’t so much about the external choices for your character that you would make in any of those games, Oblivion, any of them. You start to determine who you are, internally before you do anything externally and so I never had a sense of them feeling like okay this is the process you have to go through to play the rest of the game. But yeah, absolutely, that was our intent.Continue on for more...