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Hollywood Courting the Gaming Industry
beatleadam writes "In a trend that we all seem to already be hyper-aware of... 'The video game industry was once an afterthought in Hollywood, at most an ancillary source of revenue like action figures. The people passionately developing the computer-based form of entertainment were seen as dorks compared with the celebrities. Not anymore. Now that games have matured into a $11 billion business, topping movie box-office sales and siphoning television viewers, the lucrative and increasingly influential genre has attracted more star power than ever.'" We did another story about this a month ago.
That's just what I play video games to see:
Stuck up "actors" I don't like doing their normal piss-poor job of acting on high budget, yet poorly designed ( technologically and cinamantically ) games that I will never play, opting for net hack.
Further, let's turn a cheezy game into a movie! Yeah, it'll be slop, so people will pay us MILLIONS to bad mouth it.
And you know what? We will. At the end of the day, the execs know that we will fork over our cash for crap because we are told to do so.
In closing, let me leave you with this thought: Moo.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
we already have seen millions of dollars invested in videogames, like doom 3 and half life 2,but 5 years ago from now they would be able to relase new versions of games within 6 months of the original relase.
With the level of detail and complexity of new games this will slow down to 3 or 4 games a year per company. Time will tell when small computer game developers will join efforts in order to deliver huge games quick ($$$) ending with like about 4 mayor gaming factories, with fictional characters, some celebrities and some young programmer waiting to get his(her) big break. Is this where games are going?
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
On the Van Helsing movie site's front page, only one link actually goes to the movie's page. There's links for a video game, a cartoon, repackaged versions of old monster movies, and even Van Helsing merchandise.
If shitty advertisements disguised as films are the best Hollywood can put out, it's no wonder they need the video game industry. I'll take an Enix or Blizzard (well, make that ArenaNet) game over another Matrix sequel any day.
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that with every year, commercial game development is becoming more and more out of reach of smaller/indie studios. The expectations are being raised with every Doom3 and HL2 that comes out. Nowadays, the models have to be on par with movie-quality standards, the sound has to be done in a professional studio and etc. Gone are the days when a small studio could write a game and hit it big in the industry. Mods seem to be the only way the little people could make themselves known, and even those have to be on par with the modded game (level are not designed from blocks anymore, they are their own complex 3d models). And eventhough i drool everytime i see a new screenshot of HL2/Doom3 and see the new ATI demos, I also long for the days when people got excited by 16x16 pixel characters and 8 bit sound.
I had a blast playing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
If they can make games like this that actually have depth to them, instead of a shooter with just a level from each scene of the movie, I am all for it.
But I think there is going to be a problem seeing a movie based on a video game. You already have in your mind, a set perception of the game and how it should go.
Kinda like reading a book and then seeing the movie. It always seems like the movie sucks compared to what you had read.
Yeah, we need some more boring, crappy games based on movies and boring, crappy movies based on games so people will get jaded about the games and the industry will go into recession like it did post-Atari. Then maybe the people that are in it for the glitz instead of the games will go find something else to do.
What would we have gotten if Atari had continued to dominate back-in-the-day? More Atari 2600 Pac-Man probably. That brief recession allowed us to get the NES. Cool upgrade, eh? But,now we're getting yet another stupid James Bond game on PS-2. It needs to die so people will at least try to reinvent gaming into something better instead of continuing to push hollywoodfied, star-studded crap.
TW
I think that a lot of people here are missing the point.
Both video games and movies are basically 20th century mediums. And as such they are now halfway steps to a new 21st century medium: an interactive digitally-generated photography.
Combine synthetic animation such as the AnaNova newscaster with quasi-AI like the classic Eliza program, voice recognition, on-line anonymous interaction with thousands of strangers presenting their image to you as 'avatars'. Have it semi-scripted by Hollywood screenwriters and directors. Run it on multiprocessor systems that are 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more powerful than today's systems.
You get an entirely new medium that makes today's movies and games look as dull as Super-8 family movies and silent film tricks from a hundred years ago. There are some people in Hollywood that realize that movies are about to go the way of Vaudeville in the next twenty years
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