Warner Bros. had been considering a remake of Westworld since the early 1990s and after the departure of studio executive Jessica Goodman in 2011, the project was again under consideration. Jerry Weintraub had been pushing for a remake for years and, after his success with HBO's Behind the Candelabra, he convinced the network to greenlight a pilot. He took the project to Jonathan Nolan and co-writer Lisa Joy, who saw the potential in the concept to make something far more ambitious, and on August 31, 2013, it was announced that premium cable channel HBO had ordered a pilot for a potential television series version of the story. Nolan, Joy, J. J. Abrams and Bryan Burk are executive producers. HBO later announced that Westworld had been taken to series and that it would premiere in 2015. In August 2015, HBO released the first teaser, which revealed it would premiere in 2016. It is the second series based on Crichton's original story after the 1980s Beyond Westworld, which aired only three episodes on CBS before being cancelled.
Abrams suggested that the show be told with the perspective of the "hosts" in mind. Nolan took inspiration from video games like BioShock Infinite, Red Dead Redemption and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to deal with the narrative's moral component on a spectrum. He explained the show would explore why "violence is in most of the stories we like to watch, but it isn't part of what we like to do" through the characters known as guests, who give payment to satisfy those urges. The autonomous existence of non-player characters in video games influenced the approach to the individual storylines in Westworld that are reset in a continuous loop. A recitation from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet – "These violent delights have violent ends" – is made part of the show as a virus trigger within the hosts that alters how they perceive their existence.[38] The series explores ideas about the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, about the existence of two separate minds—one that gives instructions and another that performs them, and how consciousness comes from breaking down the wall between them by exposing the individual to new kinds of stimuli.[39] Asked whether the Roman Empire or Middle Ages-themed worlds from the original film would appear in the show, Nolan counted them out as possible new settings. George R. R. Martin met with Nolan and Joy to pitch them the idea of a Westeros-themed setting featuring androids based on Game of Thrones characters. Ed Brubaker served on the writing staff as supervising producer, co-writing the fourth episode with Nolan.