New Ghostbusters Video Game in the Works

Next month's issue of Game Informer has a big, familiar symbol on its cover. On their website, they tease the announcement of a brand-new Ghostbusters video game. This isn't some knock-off, either: "Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd are getting back together and revisiting their roles to make a sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2 - in video-game form, and we've got the first details. Both Aykroyd and Ramis are teaming up for scriptwriting duties and are going far beyond just the typical licensed add-your-voice-to-the-game-you-had-nothing-to-do-with formula" Commentary on the announcement provided by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Comments

Oh god

[japandegreeinit]

Does this mean that damn song will be coming back too?

Re:Oh god

[morgan_greywolf]

Does this mean that damn song will be coming back too? So what if it did? Who ya gonna call?!

Re:Oh god

[Anonymous Coward]

"We had a good francise, and dickless here came along and created a video game from it."

"Is this true?"

"Yes sir, it's true. This man has no dick."

Re:Oh god

[pragma_x]

Um.. Hewey Lewis?

To heck with the game

[phorm]

I've been saying for years that they should do another movie. Provided that they keep with the spirit (pun not intended) of the first two, modern special effects combined with a good script could make for a great movie.

Given hollywood's abysmal track record in late-sequals though, I think perhaps it would be better off without any, regardless of whether it is a movie or game.

Re:To heck with the game

[Applekid]

You had me up to "first two". Compared to the original, Ghostbusters 2 was sad.

Re:To heck with the game

[pete-classic]

You can hardly say that the original had a good script. A substantial amount of the film (a lot of the best parts) were ad libbed. Most of the sense of a "good script" came from the fact that Ackroyd had all this weird, but internally consistent, stuff in his head.

I think the second one had a "proper" script. Naturally, lightning didn't strike twice.

-Peter

Re:To heck with the game

[Blakey Rat]

Haha, my friends and I in psychology class used to always use the line, "Good! Now let's see what happens when we take away the puppy..."

Re:To heck with the game

[shindrak]

Word is that Aykroyd desperately wants to do another film but Murray refuses to even consider it after the disaster that was Ghostbusters 2. Perhaps if the game is a runaway success, that might change his mind.

In Soviet Russia

[onkelonkel]

the streams cross you!

What do you mean big?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning's reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.

Re:What do you mean big?

[bigstrat2003]

...that's a big Twinkie. *Venkman walks in* Egon... tell him about the Twinkie.

Re:What do you mean big?

[geekoid]

What about the Twinkie?

Keeping fingers crossed

[Fx.Dr]

Here's hoping the trio are teaming up for a third go-around out of love for the franchise instead of love for another paycheck. I can think of far too many ways this project could go sour, especially since it's been, what, almost two decades since the 2nd flick? Good luck, guys. We're pulling for you.

Multiplayer?

[JK_the_Slacker]

I see an opportunity to coin a term here... when you're engaged in multiplayer, and your teammate crosses streams with you, resulting in both your deaths... we'll call that streamkilling. Or teamcrossing. I'm still working on it.

Not the first time...

[Etherwalk]

There was an old Ghostbusters game--I remember playing it on a PCjr, I think in the late 80s. You needed one of the joystick accessories.

(The PCjr itself, incidentally, is a remarkably funny machine. To add the second 128K RAM, you... wait for it... take a cover off the side of the case and plug in a unit the depth and height of the case that makes it about an inch thicker. There isn't a parallel port on the main case, but there *is* one on the back of the extra 128K RAM, which also takes its own external power supply, if I remember correctly...)

(And you could keep going, adding inches to the case until you had 512 or 640K or some-such.)

First Screen here

[EGSonikku]

http://kotaku.com/gaming/ghostbusters/ghostbusters-screen-co+op--mp-info-322990.php

They've said the game is set in the early 90's after Ghostbusters II so either the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man makes a comeback or there is a flashback. Im voting he gets ressurected, or they are taking some license with the flashback since last I checked they never did and scaling of walls ;-)

Here's some spoiler cheat info for you

[Steeltalon]

In this game if someone asks you if you're a god YOU SAY YES!

Hilarious screenshot:

[bruins01]

http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/11/gbstaypuft.jpg

Interesting way to avoid the strike.

[HaeMaker]

Since video games manufacturers are not under WGA contract, they can write video game scripts but not movie scripts.

Will This Replace the Third Film?

[morari]

I had heard for a while that there was going to be a Ghost Busters 3, though it would be fully CGI. I really hope that this is what became of the rumors. The film would have sucked, no-doubt. A videogame has the chance to at least be decent however. It worked pretty well for Tron 2.0 ;)

Scraping bottom?

[fullmetal55]

What about that movie that's opening up soon? or has it started already? Beowulf...

it's based on an epic from 1300 years ago!

Talk about unoriginal!

I mean it's 1300 years old! who would want to see those characters in a different medium... /Sarcasm

Re:Video games based on movies are not fun to play

[mibalzonya]

As I seem to remember there was a movie about some Mario brothers that turned out to be a pretty big game.

Ghostbusters Doom

[fredrikj]

Hah, this won't hold a candle to GhostBusters DooM2!

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[ddrichardson]

The movie came out in 1984. It's the end of 2007 now. Are they hurting that badly for material?

The Warriors came out in 1979 and the game in 2005 yet is one of the best film tie-ins I've ever seen, expanding the story and letting you play through the movie.

I guess a good game is a good game, maybe when they aren't being rushed out to coincide with the movie's release, not to mention having a cult following.

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[vidarh]

What that means is that those of us who were kids when the movie opened are now right in the middle of the largest gaming demographic, and have lots of disposable cash.

And why do you think there's been so many superhero movies over the last few years all based on storylines from the 80's? I mean, I've hardly gone to a see a single superhero movie in the last ten years that's not been based heavily on storylines I remember from the comics I bought as a kid.

The timing is great - both in terms of the people who saw it in the cinemas and all of those of us who were too young and had to wait a few years to see it on TV or video.

Very true, not the first time...

[Panaqqa]

Actually, there was a Ghostbusters game written for the Commodore 64 that I can recall playing back in about 1984. Surprisingly good graphics for the standards of the time, and considering the machine could only user 8K of RAM for video (and that 8K it had to steal from the 64K RAM total in the machine).

As I recall, the program was a little over 30K in size. Hmph. These days a "hello world" executable can run 1.7 MB.

Re:Very true, not the first time...

[morgan_greywolf]

Hmph. These days a "hello world" executable can run 1.7 MB. Maybe in YOUR world.

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
                printf("Hello, world!\n");
                return(0);
}


compiled with gcc 3.4:

-rwxrwxr-x 1 me users 6788 Nov 15 16:50 hello


almost 7k.

~

Re:Very true, not the first time...

[Applekid]

It's very possible to get a Windows "Hello World" made in Visual Studio in under 5 or 6K.

If setting it to "release" mode is all you rely on you'll be unhappy. You can enter project settings and set options such as align on 1-Byte boundaries instead of the default 16, REALLY remove debugging information (strangely, some still sticks around), set the linker to exclude the default libs, things like that. Look at the options, think about what they would do, and set it to the one you think is appropriate. When done, save your profile for future projects.

You might have to dig around the Win32 API to get the "native" equivalent to printf (it'd probably be easier to just call one of the messagebox functions), but you can do it.

Ya gotta trick Microsoft's compiler into doing what you want (as opposed to just passing parameters to gcc) but it can get done. I've personally built an application for our sysadmins that monitors a specific system environment variable and lets you set it to one of three possible values from the notification area with just a click. All in exactly 4608 bytes, packaged in an EXE, including the tray icon with only Visual Studio and no packing utilities.

To be fair, though, you shouldn't HAVE to dig through all that stuff, and, heh, I probably should have stopped when the application was done. But I had a coworker tell me from the start I should just do it in .NET and I had a heart attack and aspired to make the tiniest thing possible. B)

Oblig Quotes

[MrCopilot]

Ok, She's a Dog.

Yes, Its true this man has no Dick.

Ghostbusters!?

[PixelScuba]

Awww, I thought it was gonna be He-Man.

Okay, you win, you are the fanboy of the year

[SmallFurryCreature]

We know nothing about this game except that it will be a sequel to a movie and you claim it was meant for the Wii? What on earth are you smoking and how deep is that Wiimote up your ass anyway?

It could be an adventure, it could be a sim, it could be a management game, it could be a shooter, it could be a stategy game.

What makes this game a Wii game? Take one look at the released screenshot, does that look like something the Wii can pull off?

About the only Wii connection I can think of is using the remote to control the beams, possibly a fun way of doing it, but nothing you couldn't do as easily with a mouse.

Anyway the story so far is that it is going to be on all the platforms. This usually means the game is going to suck some major donkeyballs as it will have to fit to the restrictions of ALL the platforms.

If anything, I hope that this game will have some bloody humor in it for once. The hotel shootup in game form, oh yeah, I pay for that.

Re:Has it been done before?

[Fallingcow]

It seems to me that The Odyssey is begging to have an RPG made based on it. It'd be a little like Chrono Trigger/Cross + God of War. Awesome.

For that matter, The Iliad (or better yet, the whole Trojan cycle, filling in the gaps where necessary) would make a kick-ass multiplayer hack-n-slash, a bit like Gauntlet meets Dynasty warriors, with control points and a bunch of allied NPCs helping you out. Maybe the ability to call for divine intervention from whichever god happens to be on your side. Damn, that would kick ass.

Yes, have some.

[UglyRedHonda]

Yes, have some!

Variety has a better article

[Champion3]

There's a way more informative article with additional screen shots here. Looks like Ernie Hudson (Winston), Annie Potts (Janine), and William Atherton (Peck) are signed on!

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[h4rm0ny]

Funny you should mention Lovecraft in connection with modern movies. Guilermo del Torro is directing "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm not sure if this is the Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy or the one that directed Pan's Labyrynth, but either way it's going to be a Lovecraft film with an actual budget. Also, at the other end of the scale the H P Lovercraft Historical Society produced a Call of Cthulhu film last year which is actually very entertaining (really!). They've also just released the trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness which looks even more fun. (I sincerely hope I haven't just slashdotted their servers).

who ya gonna call?

[Corf]

HE-MAN!

Don't mess with a classic

[Ed Avis]

Ah, Ghostbusters. I remember that on the Spectrum. The weird crackling noise at the start which someone explained to me was meant to be a speech sample. Driving around the map running over ghosts so that later (in what now seems a masterpiece of boring gameplay) you could suck them up with your ghost vacuum. The boxing glove on a spring which jumped up to catch ghosts (was that in the movie?). The rather anticlimactic Marshmallow Alert when all you had to do was put down ghost bait and you could run him over on the map screen. And what was the point of the game anyway? It ends when the ectoplasm count reaches 999, but should you try to slow that down or speed it up by letting ghosts reach Zuul so you can get to the end quicker?

Good theme music though.

Re:Scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[NeMon'ess]

Blame Sony. There was going to be a third Ghostbusters movie until the Blair Witch Project came out. Blair Witch made $140,000,000 and had a budget of just $60,000. Sony's executives thought they could follow the Blair Witch model and shelved Ghostbusters 3. The estimated cost of making G3 was $150,000,000.

There was already a script and lots of ideas. The material was there, and we were never going to get to see it. I hope the game finally lets us see what Sony denied us.