John Woo Establishes Game Studio With Sega

Thanks to Gamerfeed for pointing out that renowned film-maker John Woo has established a game development studio, Tiger Hill. The studio will work with Sega of America to co-create new game properties that'll hopefully capture some of the stylised action so many games have 'borrowed' from John Woo movies. What kind of chance does a film-maker have of making a difference in videogames, now films are becoming more game-like and games are becoming more film-like?

Comments

Woo-isms

[Universal Nerd]

I am a John Woo fan, mostly due to his glorifing of violence, so I must demand the following in his games:

Pidgeons or doves flapping their wings in slow motion during a small interval during a major firefight.

Guns in churches or church-like locations. Firing guns in churches is a plus.

Slow motion. This is NOT bullet time, slow motion violence is the epitomy of movie violence.

Two guns aerial fighting - Matrix ripped this off of the Master Woo, he makes firing guns and leaping seem so easy that even a wimp can do it.

Gun-play, through having AWSOME golden guns, twirling them in mid air or - the coolest of all Woo-isms - the release of the magazine and the reloading while the good guy and bad guy have a breather between more lead exchange.

Silence, five minutes of silence in an action flick is like a cool breeze in the middle of a hot summer's day. Silence and slow motion together create the perfect atmosphere during a fire-fight, add that to a reloading scene and you've got me in tears.

I've yet to see a flick with so much style as John Woo manages to put in his. Glorified Violence, as my girlfriend calls it. :)

John Woo? Vin Diesel?

[cgenman]

Video Gaming and movies are very, very different entertainment mediums, with the best games relying upon great play mechanics rather than a great story. John Woo has a wonderful sense of rhythm, timing, and camera angles but those things are controlled by the player in any game. His movies are also strongly character based, whereas videogames are concept based.

The one thing that Woo will be able to bring to the table is his ability to connect good and bad characters in such a way that they find themselves intractably bound to eachother... But as games require hundreds of faceless, nameless mooks, such character on character interaction would be less important.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of the hollywood types trying to get into something they don't understand. Nobody expects Stephen King to be able to cross over mediums from books to movies, why do people make that assumption from movies to videogames? Simply saying that they are both visual mediums and are on some sort of "convergence" shows just how little Woo understands this industry.

Re:John Woo? Vin Diesel?

[American AC in Paris]

Video Gaming and movies are very, very different entertainment mediums, with the best games relying upon great play mechanics rather than a great story. John Woo has a wonderful sense of rhythm, timing, and camera angles but those things are controlled by the player in any game.

I disagree. Game developers have often employed triggers, timers, spawn points, hidden doors, environment changes and the like to sculpt the player's actions into a clearly scripted experience, even in FPS games.

Case in point: Unreal. That one hallway--you know the one I'm talking about. You run down it, hit a switch, start to run back, and the lights start audibly going out, one by one. Eventually, you hear the last light click off, and you're treated to about four seconds of total darkness.

Then, you hear something snarl.

one second later, all hell breaks loose. You're getting -shot at- by an unseen, previously un-encountered enemy, the music goes berzerk, and you're too terrified to think straight.

Now, even though I was in total control of my character during that entire sequence, the game designers did a stunning job of sculpting the environment around my character to the point where it was quite effectively scripted. This is the kind of experience that a great movie director can bring to a video game--the ability to sculpt and prepare a game environment as if it were a scene from a movie.