The new Game of Thrones opening will show the progression of armies across the map

The opening credits to Game of Thrones are among the most iconic television openings ever. Over the past seven seasons, fans have come to know the geography of Westeros and Essos very well, thanks to the ever-shifting map we see at the top of each episode:

But as we all noticed last night, things have changed for season 8. We start at the Wall instead of King’s Landing. We visit fewer places. We go inside certain structures, and the whole thing has a fancy new coat of paint. Check it out:

The artists at Elastic — the production studio also behind the opening credits for Westworld, The Crown, and True Detective — spoke to Buzzfeed about changing up the intro for the show’s final six episodes.

Part of it is just that special effects technology has advanced in the past eight years, and the team wanted to explore it.  “You can go so much further and deeper with the tool set now than you could back when we did Season 1,” said creative director Angus Wall.

"The first seven seasons, there’s an impressionistic aspect to the title sequence that I really like in an 8-bit way, in the same way that you would like Minecraft. But the new sequence is rendered with so much more accuracy and fractal detail."

So naturally, when showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss came to Elastic and told them to “blow it out,” they jumped at the opportunity. “For us, seven years of ideas just started pouring out,” said art director said Kirk Shintani.

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But it wasn’t all about technology. The new opening credits reflect the change in tone of the story, which has gone from a sprawling tale where characters are spread over the known world to a more intimate one where most of the characters are gathered in just a few places. “To me, in Season 7, all the storylines and all the interactions between all the characters became a lot more intimate,” Shintani said. “You became acutely aware of the relationships between everybody, and how these things are going to come to a point. You’re not getting this overarching view anymore. You’re getting this down-low, really specific micro view of what’s going on.” And indeed, you can see that in the way the camera sticks closer to the ground. We’re in the s**t now.

But that doesn’t mean the map will stop being useful. In the past, it oriented you with where the characters were in space. It still does that, but now it also shows you which ways armies are moving; I’m sure we all noticed tiles flipping from white to blue to symbolize the army of the dead surrounding the Last Hearth. “It harkens back to classic strategy games like Risk, where you move game pieces around,” said Wall. “In the first seven seasons, we move from place to place. But we didn’t necessarily see representations of ‘armies’ on the move.”

And much as the places we saw on the map would change each episode to keep track with who was appearing when, the season 8 map will change as armies move and clash, which sounds very cool. “It becomes very much like a bullet point story outline of the events that have unfolded,” said Shintani. “It was really cool for us because we got a chance to help the story, instead of just framing it.”

The team has added in other details, too. “If you look at the mountain that the Last Hearth is sitting on, it has that spiral shape that you’ve seen the White Walkers lay out bodies in spiral form, and you’ve seen the spiral shape reappear on the murals on the walls in the North,” Shintani said. Yeah, we know how fond the White Walkers are of their spirals:

Another big difference is that we actually go inside places like Winterfell and the Red Keep now, to see things like the crypts and the throne room. Will the rooms we see change as the season goes on, much as the places used to change in the old credit sequence? “I’ll say that there are differences in every single episode,” Shintani said, eschewing details like an old pro. “From episode to episode, pay attention, because there’s lots of hints scattered around.”

Because the map plays more of a role in the story this time around, Elastic received more information about the plot than usual, so yes, I’ll be watching closely. Wall even offered his take on why the credits now end in King’s Landing, where they used to begin there. “The show is called Game of Thrones, and the Iron Throne is in King’s Landing,” Wall said. “I don’t know that this is going to be the case or not, but the entire show is moving towards the Iron Throne. … So it made sense to end there.”

It’s also interesting to hear about the things Shintani always wanted to include in the credits but never could, like the Three-Eyed Raven’s cave. “We never really established where that was,” he said. “If I had another shot at it to start over in Season 1, and redo every single season over again, I would try to sneak some of those things in there.”

We’ll be watching the credits closely as the season goes on.

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