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

A new way?

[Dreetje]

Making games already requires people from different expertises, artists, musicians, plot writers etc. In this mr. Woo will be no different.
However he's an expert in entertainment, and that's what it all really comes down to, right?

The site doesn't show much promising stuff yet. Just a few images.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.

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. :)

Re:Woo-isms

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

"Two guns"

To me, the most satisfying experience in an arcade is pumping a dollar into Lethal Enforcers and gunning through the game with both guns blazing. I don't know why a company didn't release a game that used two guns for a single player by design. Sure, you don't get twice the quarters from the people who already play these games that way BUT I don't think that many people are playing that way. But anyway, I'm getting off topic here - yeah, two guns at the same time rule. I've heard it described as John Woo-style so I think Sega has the right guy here. Did they release any details about whether this is going to be a company supervising console games or arcade machines? Does anyone still make arcade machines that don't involve dancing?

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.

John Woo movies aren't all "bullet ballet"

[Abraxis]

I'm a big John Woo fan. I enjoy his american-made action films more than most of the genre, but his true genious is in the films he made in his Hong Kong days. What I love about movies like "The Killer" and "A Better Tomorrow" is that in addition to the unmatched action/gunplay, the movies are extremely thematic and symbolic. His Hong Kong pictures all revolve around themes like loyalty, brotherhood/camaraderie, humanity/compassion, and duty. His films often put two or more of these themes in direct conflict with one another-- and it's this dramatic tension that make the "heroic bloodshed" genre that was basically invented by Woo so much more than Chow Yun Fat sliding down a bannister in slow motion, twin berettas blazing.

I'm skeptical that a video game would succeed in capturing the greatness of John Woos films-- simply because the themes and symbolism that really make Woo's films special would be drowned out by the focus on the "action".

Having said that-- I still love playing "Action Half-Life" now and then :)

What kind of chance?

[AnamanFan]

"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?"

I know this seems like a shameless promotion since it comes out tomorrow, but the answer to that question will be answered with "Enter the Matrix."

This is a very rare project where film directors are in the director's chair for a video game. This is revolutionary mainly because it breaks taboos in Hollywood about video games.

A few weeks ago, Emerson College in Boston held their 'Web Night' panel discussion which included Randy Fenton, the founder of Dare to Play (DtP). DtP is a tool to create a non-liner narrative structure using a hotmail-like account to interact with characters. The intent is for branding for movies where audiences experience a sort of prequel to a movie (as well as some Edutainment applications).

The common problem he has faced is being labeled as a game. For example, DtP was featured under the Sundance Interactive Festival, but only by a hair. The board was at a fight between calling DtP a game or not. Sundance Interactive do not want to incorporate 'games' into the festival, but how can an interactive project not be constructed as a game? Under this logic, titles like 'Myst' or 'The Longest Journey' do not have narrative merit. This is the challenge between the movie and gaming industries.

Hollywood thinks all video games are variations of Pong.

There are a lot of reasons and theories as to why, from union issues to change in audience positioning. But now, special effects work is very similar to video game creation, especially with motion-capture and human scanning practices. The film industry is already making mini-videogames as non-interactive movies for a few years now. Something needs to point out this fact to the industry.

I believe the Wachowski brothers will make that point with The Matrix. The principal photography of the new series of The Matrix was of 3 main units, "Matrix: Revolutions," "Matrix: Reloaded," and "Enter the Matrix." Film people made a video game. The game may or may not be revolutionary for the audience (out side of the plot's involvement with the movie), but it will be for the process of creating a video game.

It shall be exciting to see what happens next...

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.