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Game of Thrones Creator Talks Season 7 and Plans for Ending the Show [SPOILERS]

"The pieces are on the board now."

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The sixth season of Games of Thrones is now over, with a truly epic final episode broadcast on HBO last Sunday. With only two shorter seasons to go, joint-showrunner David Benioff has been speaking about what fans can expect from Season 7.

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In a new interview with Deadline, the Emmy-winning producer revealed that he and partner DB Weiss have known how Game of Thrones will ultimately end for a while. "We've known the end for quite some time and we're hurtling towards it," Benioff said. "Those last images from the show that aired last night showed that. It's not just trying not to outstay your welcome. We're trying to tell one cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end."

Benioff confirmed that the show was always supposed to have a finite running time, and ultimately be viewed as a single epic story.

"From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that's what we'll end up with," he confirmed. "The pieces are on the board now. Some of the pieces have been removed from the board and we are heading toward the end game. The thing that has excited us from the beginning, back to the way we pitched it to HBO is [that] it's not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it's trying to figure out new storylines.

"We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra ten hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to make something where, if people watched it end-to-end, it would make sense as one continuous story. We're definitely heading into the end game now."

The big change since the pair began work on Game of Thrones in 2010 is that the show is no longer based on the novels of George RR Martin. The episodes overtook the books from season six, and Benioff admits that this has made plotting the end trickier than it otherwise would have been.

"It's a strange phenomenon," he said."We're in this territory where you are walking on your own and can't rely on the written material anymore. As we get close to the ending, we've been talking about that for so long, things come into better focus. Once we get to the final end game, we've got very specific ideas that have grown organically over the past six plus years about where everything will end up."

Game of Thrones season seven is expected to air in spring 2017.

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