It therefore may come as no surprise that a video game based on Peaky Blinders also refuses to take the easy route. Rather than go for an action-heavy genre, Peaky Blinders: Mastermind is instead a puzzle game. Much like the Peaky Blinders themselves, Mastermind developers FuturLab ask the player to solve the game's challenges with brains just as much as brawn.

Related: Things That Happened In Peaky Blinders Season 1 That You Completely Forgot About

Some fans may nonetheless be wondering why Peaky Blinders didn't go down the route of thief 'em-ups like Grand Theft Auto. Thankfully, FuturLab MD James Marsden and Peaky Blinders Executive Producer Jamie Glazebrook were on hand to discuss Mastermind, from its genre fit through to how it complements Peaky Blinders as a whole.

Screen Rant: I’ve had a sit down with Mastermind, and it was very interesting to play a Peaky Blinders game that’s very puzzle focused. Often when you see these adaptations of television shows or films they’re much more action-driven, for better or worse. Why did you choose a puzzle adventure game as a video game adaptation of the show? What does this provide that a narrative-based adventure like the Walking Dead games or more action heavy genre would not?

James Marsden: If you look at FuturLab’s discography, we are genre agnostic and we’re platform agnostic. And so we are all about the idea. It’s the idea that excites us, and we’ll find whatever vehicle, whatever genre, allows us to realise that idea to its full potential. The idea with this was to show the player what it feels like to be Tommy Shelby; to be the master manipulator of his crew and family.

When we first pitched it to Curve, we pitched it as a thinking player’s action game. But really it’s not that. It became much more clear whilst we were building out the mechanics and the individual abilities of each character, and started to get a feel for the types of levels that we could build, it was very much leaning more towards puzzle adventure.

We didn’t set out to choose puzzle at the start. It just became that as the most natural manifestation of the idea.

Jamie Glazebrook: I think for us as the makers of the TV show, obviously there is a bit of that action that would almost translate to a first-person shooter, especially in series four when they’re attacked by Adrian Brody and the Italian Changretta family. But one of the real cores is Tommy Shelby looking at everyone and everything and thinking “how can that work for me? How can I use that as part of my strategy? That’s very interesting, but what use are they to me?” I think one of the deep joys is knowing that he has a long term strategy for himself and his family, and then if there’s a problem he’ll do a short term strategy, and it’ll usually involve everybody and all parts of the organisation.

The fact that James, when they started to talk about their intentions, totally clicked into that, was incredibly exciting as it felt that they understood one the secret parts of the recipe.

As a fan of the television show, it’s really refreshing to see a video game adaptation that’s very different from a lot of the other adaptations out there, such as first-person shooters or third person action games. For me it showed how video games can complement other IPs. Do you think that there are other benefits that video games can have for other properties, and how do you think they complement other media?

Jamie Glazebrook: When you’re watching the TV show, we make Peaky Blinders on actually quite a slim budget, and you’re imagining a lot of what you think you see. If we do a street scene with lots of people walking up and down, that’s quite a big number for us. You don’t have that big aerial view of Birmingham with all the different factories and everything; you’re usually very close. It’s lovely, your imagination is filling it in.

I think that one of the things I see in the game is that it’s almost looking at parts of the world that you’ve possibly imagined but haven’t seen. And then, you’re imagining other bits of it. When a world is as layered as Peaky is – within an episode there’s the gangster world, the political world, the gypsy world and they’re all sitting on top of each other, much like as when you go into any city there are many worlds sitting on top of each other and when you look there are many people living totally different existences right next to each other – and I think the video game finds a way into that. There might be a whole other thread that you might be able to pick up and turn into a different experience. I think it is complementary when you’ve got (thanks to our wonderful writer Steven Knight) a world that can take it.

James Marsden: Agreed. It’s a super-layered IP and we’ve had plenty of fun with that. From our point of view in of doing service to an existing IP, we came at it by identifying where the tension is that makes the IP special. For us, the thing that makes Tommy special is that he is super smart. The thing that we believe makes the show tick is that he’s in the middle of this mess and everything is against him, and he can find a way through his smarts to rise out of the mess. As a game maker, if you can figure out quickly where the tension is in a particular IP then you can translate that tension into actual game mechanics.

If you were dropping this IP into a first-person shooter or third-person sandbox game, the tension there is very different to what Tommy Shelby feels and why the audience loves the show in my view. The tension in the game is similar to the tension you feel when watching the show, and I think that’s why it works. That’s the way to go forward in doing these types of games, where it’s not a 150-man team that are on a tight deadline to deliver against a particular release date of a movie or a TV show’s new season, and the result is sub-par as they don’t have enough time or money. This was an opportunity – I feel like we’ve done service to what makes the show interesting to fans, and it’s all about getting the tension right.

In of doing service to it, what I’ve enjoyed is the way the different characters operate, as they’ve all got their own specialities. Can you give some insight into how you decided the particular skillsets of the characters and how you balanced those together to create this cohesive puzzle package?

James Marsden: This is fun as we’ve not actually discussed this at all with Jamie or his colleagues, so you might find this funny! Let’s start with Polly, as she’s the eldest. She’s the treasury, and the safe pair of hands. She looks after the business when the boys are away. In the first season she also pulls a pin out of her hair, and threatens Grace with it. And so we thought "that pin could be used to pick some locks." In a puzzle game you have free movement for characters around a space, so you need to block those characters from being able to move, and those are the most simple building blocks of a puzzle game like this. Having doors that you can’t get through and needing to pick locks seemed like a suitable thing for Polly to be able to do. But also, because she’s the treasury she’s got the wads of cash, so she can potentially bribe corrupt coppers to do her bidding. That’s where Polly came into it.

We noticed that John is berated by Polly for leaving guns lying around, because Finn’s found running around with a loaded gun, and it’s always struck me that John is the most boisterous or the most up for action of the Peaky Blinders, and the most proud of being this terrorising group. Initially we gave him explosives, but after some discussion back and forth it was decided that arson would be a better fit for how the Peaky Blinders go about threatening their rivals. They just burn them to the ground instead of using explosives. The initial idea for explosives came from how a few times you see grenades trigged by tripwires – they’ve obviously learned that trick from the war, so we thought that was interesting.

Arthur’s the hothead. He’s got explosive rage, so him kicking down the doors that are blockers seems like something he would do. He obviously brawls as well; he’s a boxer in the show. We also love Arthur’s walk. The fact that he walks with both wrists in front of him communicates his willingness to get into a fight. He’s just walking headlong into the action, so we thought that was really important to have in the game.

Probably my favourite scene in the first season is when Ada strolls up with her pram, and she distracts all the Peaky Blinders on one side and all of Billy Kimber’s guys on the other side. They’re about to kick off, and Ada just walks in with her pram and distracts everyone from what they were about to do. We thought "she’s a young, attractive woman and she’s got this ability to distract people," so we thought that was an obvious one for Ada to use her guile to distract people.

Tommy was a difficult one. For a while we were thinking that Tommy should have a gun, because there is violence in the show, and the fans would expect that. But that was going against the grain of what we initially pitched, and what made much more sense was for Tommy to be able to intimidate people just by touching his cap, pulling it down and showing the blade. Because people know who Tommy Shelby is, they know what is going to happen; he doesn’t actually have to do the act himself, and so the idea that he would be able to control NPCs and take control of them for a short time made much more sense for Tommy’s character and the mechanics as a whole.

Finally, Finn was never really part of the original pitch. It was supposed to just be the original five, but we found that we needed an additional character that could just be super-stealthy and climb in through windows and small gaps to allow other characters to access those buildings that might have locked doors. Actually, the game we’ve ended up with would not be possible without Finn.

Jamie Glazebrook: I’ve not heard that breakdown exactly, and it totally tallies – it makes great sense.

James Marsden: Hooray!

Moving on from that, part of the reason that I love the show is that it’s more than just the characters and more than just the machinations of this family. There’s also a lot of social commentary in there. Are there any ways that Mastermind ties into the show’s themes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the struggle to find a place after the Great War or any of those elements?

James Marsden: I don’t want to spoil things for you, but we do explore Tommy’s Post-Traumatic Stress, flashbacks and things like that, and his use of opium. That’s definitely in the game. We wanted to try and get a moment in there that forced him to soul search a bit. You walk a fine line between trying to crowbar story ideas into a game when people just want to hit next and take control, but also do justice to the characters you’re working with and reflect some of the things that have been developed already that people will expect. So hopefully we’ve struck the right chord there.

Jamie Glazebrook: That’s the thing that makes sense with what we’ve talked about in the early stages. On one level he really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing, and if you take that away then it becomes just like any other kind of gangster thing, and I think it’s really important to keep those elements in. It’s great to know that they are.

James Marsden: We noticed that whenever he does smoke opium, assumingly he’s doing it to forget. Those are the moments where he wakes up in a blind panic and a cold sweat from the soldiers hitting the wall and digging through. So it’s not doing him any favors at all. There’s this interesting tension there.

It’s clear that the game understands the show. You’re in this very early part of the overall Peaky Blinders story with Mastermind, so is there a chance that there will be further instalments of the Mastermind series that have been missed during the time gaps, to make it more of a canon part of the Peaky Blinders timeline?

Jamie Glazebrook: I really like the fact that we’re not trying to cover everything, and that it’s very specific to the time before series one. It feels great that there are many opportunities to go in different directions. It’s not been discussed at this point but it feels like there’s lots of potential. If you look at all the strange and unexpected places the show goes in the future series – weirder and weirder as you go along – yet at the same time all set up from that first series as well, I think there’s plenty of opportunity. How do you feel James?

James Marsden: We wanted to not step on the toes of the show. We wanted to have our own villains to weave into the setup for the first season. The tapestry is extremely rich, and if there’s an opportunity in the future to revisit there’s plenty to explore. Fingers crossed!

Mastermind is all about this Chinese gang that are introduced as this new faction. There was the discussion of opium deals and Brilliant Chang in the fifth series. Is this a hint about what’s to come in the show?

Jamie Glazebrook: I can’t possibly comment about what’s to come in the show! Apart from it’s full of surprises, that will hopefully delight and shock. In of the fact that you identified the Chinese gang as an interesting place to go, at that point we hadn’t shared with FuturLab that Brilliant Chang was in series five. It was very interesting that they found that thread and were willing to pull on it. It was a very good moment of James being super-sensitive to what was there, because obviously the Chinese are mentioned in those first scenes in the first series, and you’re waiting for that to be mined again, and we were delighted when Brilliant Chang did arrive in series five. It’s just a wonderful piece of sensitivity I think.

James Marsden: Honestly, it just came from watching the first series a few times and spotting that one of the first lines that Arthurs speaks in the show is “you don’t mess with the Chinese.” You don’t see that play out in the first season. We’d seen up until season four at that point, and not seen the Chinese featured – there’s obviously history there, and we thought we could flesh that out. When we delivered the script to Endemol and Mandabach, they were like “oh you’ve gone really far with this Chinese thing, that’s interesting! You might want to tone this bit down, because we’re doing a different thing in the show.”

If you’re looking at the historical figure of Brilliant Chang, starting off in Birmingham and moving to London, and now he’s shown up in the show in 1929, are there going to be more discussions in Mastermind about opium’s place in post-War British society, and about those notorious figures, and does it tie into how he shows up in the show down the line?

James Marsden: Brilliant Chang specifically doesn’t show up in the game – it’s a happy accident that we were featuring the Chinese gangs. But we do feature opium, and we’re making our own commentary on the use of opium in the game, and what it does to Tommy and how it affects his family. It’s not particularly effective for what he wants to use it for. But we don’t go any further than that.

Jamie Glazebrook: The thing that’s been mined in the series is that there were bursts of hedonism after the War, which often related to people trying to escape what they had been through. It started massively in the 1920s, but then stopped a bit as well. It was everywhere, and there were Daily Mail articles about the threat of Brilliant Chang and his like, and then that just sort of stopped as well.

I don’t know whether that’s because different threats emerged and the general strike turned people’s heads in a different direction, but it was there as a big thing, and you see it in stories like Broken Blossoms, the D.W. Griffith film set in Limehouse with opium dealers. It was something that people got very worked up by, and it’s good to look at that through the lens of 2020. In a way Tommy and the gang will always be self-medicating on something: in series one it’s opium, and in series two it became cocaine.

Unfortunately the production of season six has been delayed because of the current situation with COVID-19, and rightly putting people’s safety first. Was there any impact on the development of Mastermind because of this, and if so how did you change your working to overcome it? Do you think that this could lead to some permanent changes to the way in which games are made?

James Marsden: We just rolled with the punches. Fortunately for video games were are able to effectively continue as normal, although it’s no fun not being able to see your colleagues, or bump into each other making a cup of tea and things like that. We’re keen to get back into the studio as soon as possible. The way we dealt with it was sending everyone home with their machines, and giving them as much time as was needed to come to with what was happening.

We chose to act long before the government did. I was watching what was happening in China, and it actually landed in Brighton before it arrived in Iran or Italy. When we told everyone to pack up and go home, it was quite a move to make because nobody else was doing it. It took a while for people to get comfortable with that.

Then we were doing our best. Hayley, our studio assistant, has changed her role from coming in and getting things ready for the start of the day - emptying the dishwasher, making sure the windows are open if it’s a hot day, answering emails, answering phone calls these kind of things - to wellbeing for the team. She'll turn up with a birthday cake for someone’s birthday at their front door, taking a selfie and posting it into the Slack channel to remind everyone that we’re all still humans.

She’s done so much stuff to help us continue being a team in this weird digital workplace that we all have now. Something that Hayley did here was send everyone a plant, and we’ve seen everyone’s plants grow remotely. It's that nature and human touch that can be maintained if you make a bit of effort. It’s been great that she’s been able to move into that role of a wellbeing manager, and I can imagine that being a role for people going forward. When you have people in the same room they look after each other, but when everyone’s isolated you need someone to go and check in on everyone.

We’re not enjoying it by any stretch, but we’re getting on with it and making the best of it. In of Peaky Blinders it affected the QA process. We had four QA managers in as many weeks at one point, because they were getting ill. That’s affected the games industry across the board: everyone’s felt that problem.

Having said all that, we are extremely lucky that we’ve been able to do our jobs at all, whereas so many industries are crippled and on their knees. We’re just grateful to be able to keep working.

Jamie Glazebrook: Caryn Mandabach Productions is tiny – we’re seven people! We curate and look after Peaky like it’s our own child. We’re thinking about it and talking about it all the time, for what we can do that’s special. Obviously it then expands when we’re in production, where we have an amazing producer and director, and all the heads of department and huge cast. Suddenly there’s hundreds of people working on it. But the core company is tiny. In a sense we’ve been able to weather that. We would have a Peaky call and a development call, and we’d keep on talking to each other, but I can imagine that when you get beyond ten people everything becomes much harder.

Finally, is there another television show, book or movie that you’d like to see in the style of Peaky Blinders: Mastermind? Is there an IP you’d really love to get your hands on to translate into a video game?

Jamie Glazebrook: I don’t know what Mad Men the video game would be, but certainly Don Draper is a puzzle! I don’t think I should go too deep into what he’s puzzling all the time, but I would certainly be interested to see a video game that puts his brain on display. A little bit of business, but mostly the other stuff.

James Marsden: We do, actually. Kirsty, my business partner and I are both designers and we are really inspired by choreography and dance. The idea of Tommy choreographing an ensemble cast to carry out what we consider a dance (albeit a slow one) could be applied to a couple of other IPs in a different genre. If you imagine Mission: Impossible, where you’ve got the Ethan Hunt character who is the pointman – he can’t carry out his role without all the other characters playing their part as well. So we’d like to have a stab at that at some point. So we’ll see!

More: Peaky Blinders: The Main Characters Ranked By Kill Count

Peaky Blinders: Mastermind releases August 20, 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.