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Video Games Hit The Big Screen
Anonymous Coward writes "A movie theatre owner in Logan, Utah is hoping to start a new trend by bringing video games (Halo in this case) to the big screen. The local newspaper in Logan, The Herald Journal has a nice write-up about the success they had. Does anyone else think this could catch on to be successful, especially in college towns?"
Put Doom3 or Halo in an IMAX and you won't have any trouble getting $50 out of my wallet.
Is the theater really going to make more money doing this than showing a movie?
It says that "There is a $3 charge for spectators to watch the games.", but that's a far cry from the $7+ they would charge for a movie.
Who here would actually participate, either player or spectator?
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Those projectors do not get used for slide sales demos ALL of the time you know. The response time is a little slow on the LCD screens, but lower the demo screen, set up the speakers and fire away.
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Why not do this 'right'....
Host (for example) a arcade-version Street Fighter tournament at the movie theater and tap the game's A/V signals and route them through the theater's sound system and image projector to make the action appear on the movie screen. Charge a modest spectator fee to fill the seats (and likely offer a cut of it as prize money) and knock yourself out!
Note that classic games like PAC-MAN and TEMPEST won't do as they are played in 'portrait' mode and not the 'landscape' mode that is the same as the orientation of the movie screen.
Sure, but that was Nintendo in the early nineties. The pixels were probably measurable in inches on a big screen. 3D graphics and smooth first person gameplay make everything better :)
i most certainly believe this is going to become a popular way to game (in multiplayer situations for sure). i just graduated from college and i cant tell you how many hours my friends and i wasted playing HALO on the projector i bought. whenever it was time to make teams (i was in a fraternity so we always had 8 people ready to play) there was always a huge fight over who got to play on the "big screen" and who had to go in the other room and play on the tv. i definitely recommend that if any HALO fans get a chance to play on a projection screen, take it! its a totally different experience. incidentally, there were clubs at school that used to commandeer lecture halls and stage huge HALO tourneys on the projection screens. this was at MIT though, so i guess that might not be so common.
Video games have been done on a bigger "screen" than that: Brown students create massive Tetris game on building
I'm curious about this. There are a lot of accounts of theaters running gaming and such being posted on here. Of these, how many people are actually hooking the sound up to the theater system? As nice as it would be to see the game at theater size, it would be even cooler to hear it, provided it was hooked up in full surround, not just stereo, or upmixed 2 channel surround.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Feh, we did that in 1999 at the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center IMAX theater.
Sonic Adventure was truly nausea-inducing on the big screen, but Crazy Taxi was a blast. And then, there was multiplayer Goldeneye.
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I would like convince my local theatre manager (I happen to know him) to do this, but he wants to know which steps are involved?
Who do you have to get permission from?
What if you do not charge (peeps will still want popcorn and soda)?
What hoops must you go through to have fun?
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A friend of mine recently bought a projector, and we started playing XBOX games on it. Most are great and it's made a huge difference to the gaming experience. The only problem is that for people who have a tendency to experience motion sickness when playing FPS style games (like Halo) the effects become amplified. I can play Halo on a normal tv and only feel a little ill after, but after just a minute on the big screen I cannot play any more.
This is exactly why I play on two screens at my own house: a 51" projection TV, and an 80" projector against a white wall, both on computers. The colors are not as good as a monitor, but load up Doom 3 and start walking around the complex, and 80" of screen will make you poop your pants when something pops out and starts shooting you. The surround sound system helps, too.
I'm already using the computer on the system for a media center anyway, playing games was the next logical step, and no P2/XBox needed.
The theatre idea is perfect if you don't have the funds to buy your own or like to be more social with your gaming. I can see this being the next reason that people actually leave their homes and interact with other people, rather than go to bars and risk a DWI/DUI.
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When I was at The University of Texas (graduated two summers ago in '03) the Business School buildings (probably a few others, too) had projector screens built in to in the rooms with a VGA connector in the podiums. Very smooth hookups for laptops, VCRs built into the podium too, etc.
My *entire* senior year was spent lusting after these screens, wanting to get me and a few friends down to these buildings at night when classes were out to play on them. But it was always too much of a hassle, we had to worry about getting people together, ensuring we had time before the gates rolled down, etc.
Finally, my roommate and I managed to go down one weekend and hook up a VGA adapter to my Gamecube (not one of the good hacked HDTV cables, one of the boxes that converts S-Video to crappy VGA) and we managed to beat Wind Waker on the big screen. Apart from a few awful graphical glitches from the box, it was great. I forgot what other games I brought with me, but It was really satisfying to see the ending to Zelda on a big screen like that.
As far as size, I'm not sure how big they were. Maybe about 5 feet tall? Still, it was fun. A shame we didn't do it sooner. Smash Bros. would've given all of us a headache. Heh.
Skadus
I've actually done this before. Thanks to my affinity with an Anime club, we had access to University theater projection equipment. Car racing type games were breathtaking since the cars were pretty much life sized! The only games that didn't work too well were side scrolling space shooters where there were lots of objects to track on screen. They're difficult because it takes longer for your eyes to track the whole field of view on a big screen killing your reaction time. Aside from that it was a lot of fun. I think if theaters decide to do this, it will be loads of fun! :)
Well, one unfortunate fact about Halo that other games do better (such as the aforementioned DoA games) is the splitscreen. Its more fun watching a single game than multiple small screen games split up out of one big screen. A multiplayer single-screen brawl game such as Bomberman, Super Smash Bros, or PowerStone II would be best, imho. Fast enough to run a tournament that way too, and let the whole audience play.
The Cleveland Indians allowed people during "College Night" to play on their newly replaced JumboTron (now the largest screen in North America) at Jacob's Field on their "College Night" on May 6, 2004.
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I don't have any photos of the event, except for a local radio station's gallery of pictures.
http://www.wmms.com/jacor-common/globalphotos.htm
It's kinda coincidental that they've also made the connection between college and big-screen gaming.
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I've used movie screens to play games, and the key is tournaments. Just getting together and playing only works if it's one group of friends, but even a huge group will be happy to pay in and spectate if they're competing in a tournament for prizes.
We had an MS-sponsored college recruiting halo tournament, 8 players at a time, dozens in the audience, with prizes ranging from tshirts to xbox games to an xbox for the winner. It was a lot of fun, but without the competition it would've sucked.
The image looked pretty good though. The low resolution just isn't a problem. Of course high res would be much nicer, but even in 4 way split screen it's watchable.
Our conclusion was it could work with about a $50,000 investment in equipement and rennovations and could turn a tidy profit, however it was the fact that it was the X-box and we found that while gamers would pay to play on larger screens that many wouldn't because the ease of setting up a 4 room X-box match in the Dorms or existing frat houses, many of which had several new flat-panel TV's in every room (college/frats had just built 4 brand new houses at an average price of $2M a peice).
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About 10 years ago I worked for a tradeshow company. I was in the (not so) grand ballroom of a Silicon Valley hotel converging a projector that was setup on a 9'x12' screen and needed a computer video source to test it.
;-)
So I brought in my old MacIIfx and fired up PacMan of all games. Let me tell you that PacMan on a 9x12 screen in a dark room with a set of Bose 402s was amazing.
PacMan suddenly got a whole lot cooler. But it was all for testing purposes of course