The highly anticipated new Ghostbustersgame has finally been given a release date: June 2009. That may not be specific enough for you, especially since it was originally supposed to come out this fall, but as Karina previously reported, Atari has decided to coincide its release with the original film’s 25th anniversary. To ease your impatience, though, there’s an awesome new trailer for the video game (view it on YouTube), in which you can hear some of the new vocal performances from Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis.
I can’t stand video games, but even I’m looking forward to playing this thing. Then again, I’m such a fan of Ghostbusters that I’d be just as excited if the new game was as simple as the old Activision Ghostbusters game for the Commodore 64, a demonstration of which I’m sharing as today’s clip. Oh, I hope you didn’t think by the headline that I’d found a demo of the new game. Sorry about that, if you did. I didn’t mean to trick you. Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy the video anyway. Check it out after the jump.
When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated Ghostbusters video game written by Dan Ackroyd and featuring vocal contributions from Bill Murray and the rest of the main cast of the film franchise, which was said to pick up narratively where Ghostbusters 2 led off. Now Atari has taken the game off Vivendi’s hands, with speculative plans to release it next year in concert with the first film’s 25th anniversary.
Sam Mendes has been hired to direct a cinematic adaptation of Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s graphic novel about a religulous man fighting evil post-apocalypse.
Dylan McDermott, Zoe Saldana, Lake Bell, Nick Stahl, Paz Vega and Shannen Doherty will star in Burning Palms, a satire of Los Angeles stereotypes from writer/director Christopher Landon, which producer Oren Segal says is “kind of like a John Waters version of Short Cuts.”
I’m a self-admitted board game junkie. Perhaps the Sears catalog from back in the 1980s is to blame. The photos of uber-happy families playing games together perverted my mind into thinking that everything that Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers put out was simply something I just had to have. Hell, they even made The Game of Life look like it was incredibly fun. So, now that I’m older and don’t have a parent telling me “no,” I’ve been collecting all these odd and old games. I was sorting through some of my stranger games today and spotted one I forgot I owned: Gosford Park: The Board Game. That’s right, they made a board game out of Gosford Park.
That made me wonder what the strangest movie to become a video game has been. You know, like if they’d made Little Miss Sunshine into a video game. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be a pretty fun game: get Olive to the beauty pageant on time while avoiding obstacles like Grandpa’s death, color blindness, and the realization that you have a failing career. Okay, maybe it’s not that great of idea, but still. Turning A Clockwork Orange into a game sounds strange as well, but someone has already thought about it.
During Spout’s coverage of Comic-Con last week, my ears perked up during the Entertainment Weekly: Visionaries panel when Watchmendirector Zack Snyder started railing about the disconnect between video games and Hollywood. It’s nice to know that the director of next year’s mega-tentpole hopeful doesn’t want the marketing department at Warner Bros. to rush something craptacular to the waiting masses. Just like Steven Spielberg did in 1983.
Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.
If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated Ghostbusters video game written by Dan Ackroyd and featuring vocal contributions from Bill Murray and the rest of the main cast of the film franchise, which was said to pick up narratively where Ghostbusters 2 led off. Now Atari has taken the game off Vivendi’s hands, with speculative plans to release it next year in concert with the first film’s 25th anniversary.
