A three-person studio is rebuilding Netherfield Park from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice inside Fortnite, one historically accurate chair at a time.
The studio, Whenere, (a blend of “when” and “where”) was founded by science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson and veteran game artist Karen Laur. The team is using Fortnite and AI startup Dreamlands to turn Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into a stage for interactive fan-fiction. The project started by building out a digital replica of Mr. Bingley’s Netherfield Park, the estate at the center of the novel’s early chapters, with a team of three developers.
In Whenere’s vision for this next chapter in the world of fan fiction, creators are able to write a scene in a web-based editor, then watch characters perform it live in Fortnite. The studio leaned on Dreamlands, an AI startup built on Google’s Gemini models and largely hosted on Google Cloud, to generate much of the furniture and décor and maintain historical accuracy.
Laur described her and Stephenson’s vision behind the studio’s mission. “We started Whenere because we wanted to shorten the distance between imagining a story and seeing it come to life in a 3D world,” she said. In the game, creators will get to set the scene, place the characters and write the dialogue themselves, then publish their custom-built Pride and Prejudice fan fiction.
Viewers can watch the performance live in Fortnite, or the creator can record it as a video to share. The format is deliberately linear. ” The studio builds on Unreal Editor for Fortnite and existing character skins.
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