A few weeks ago I wrote a story about the wealth of video game documentaries that were out there or coming soon, and one of the commenters mentioned Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball. I hadn’t seen this before, and hadn’t even heard about it. It’s a documentary about the Pinball 2000 project that Williams Electronics, the world’s largest pinball manufacturer at the time, initiated to try and meld video games and pinball machines into one gaming unit. The effort ultimately failed, and signaled the death blow for pinball machines.
Director Greg Maletic could have focused on the entire history of pinball, from the early beginnings as “bagatelle” in the 1700s, to its current near-death rattle, but instead he chose to single out the Pinball 2000 project from Williams. He was able to speak with all of the players involved, except for the actual plug-pullers at Williams, and it’s an amazing documentary that stands as a testament to what could have been.
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.
I feel a little bit like Professor Farnsworth from Futurama when I say this, but “Good news, everyone!” Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade is coming to Showtime next month. Producer Michael Verrechia emailed me after I wrote the Chasing Ghosts vs. The King of Kong piece to tell me that it had generated a lot of responses. While I can’t claim that I made this deal happen, it’s great to know that people who have been hearing about this movie for almost two years will finally be able to see it. Set your DVRs to “retro” and be sure to watch this and let us know what you think.
In May 2006, Legendary Pictures announced that they had acquired the rights from Blizzard Entertainment to make a World of Warcraft movie. There was the sound of enormous rejoicing from gamers around the world and then … a great silence. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy and were suddenly silenced. Since then, the silence from Legendary and Blizzard has been fairly deafening. Two years later and still no news on the project. Apparently it’s still in development but they haven’t hired the “someone along the lines of a Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan type” they wanted to direct the project.
With a planned release date of 2009 impossible to meet at this point, why not just scrap the whole thing? They could save themselves the embarrassment of spending over $100 million dollars on a movie that’ll end up tanking at the box office and become a pack-in freebie with the next expansion set. There’s a growing mountain of reasons not to make this movie; take a look at them after the break.
The holiday video game season is already fast upon us, and over the next few weeks several highly anticipated video games will finally be hitting store shelves. However, none of them has a big-budget (or even indie-sized budget… that would be a fun experiment) film adaptation hitting the theater concurrently, which is probably a good thing, because we’d end up with a lot of half-assed video games.
But which new games should be turned into movies? Thankfully, imagination has finally been creeping back into games, and it’s high time Hollywood pays attention (although, of course, the guys blasting aliens with guns will still be there.) Here’s a list of video games that should be turned into movies.
In the 1980s it seemed like Hollywood hated everything that was going to compete with it: television, video games, books, comics, you name it. If it wasn’t being used as an ancillary product for a movie, then it was the enemy. Why would an executive want to embrace something like Spider-Man or Space Invaders and try turning it into a movie? Which, granted might be why so many movies from the 1980s were classic. Where’s our next John Hughes, already? If there was a video game announced tomorrow based on Ferris Bueller’s DayOff or Weird Science, I would retire this column for eternity. Unless the game sucked.
But what about movies that came out years ago that still live on through video games? Games have single-handedly managed to keep some franchises flush with cash, long before the currently Hollywood trend of retreading, prequelizing, and refurbishing movie happened. Now, you’re just as likely to have a game coming out day in date with the movie, if not a few weeks before in an effort to hype the buzz. But what about those that came before? Here are a few examples.
It wasn’t that long ago that Activision announced they’d struck a deal with Brett Ratner to develop movies based on their video games –– and that he wants to direct a Guitar Hero film. Now the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction as Electronic Arts just announced that they’ve struck a three video game deal with Zack Snyder.
We caught up with Zack at last night’s Watchmen event to find out the details. As it turns out, he’s a late-night gaming addict, even in the middle of trying to finish a huge Hollywood movie.
There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
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.
Brad Pitt has officially signed on to play the lead role in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. Other stars who have deals in the works: Nastassja Kinski, Simon Pegg, David Krumholtz.
Electronic Arts is producing a video game based on The Godfather II. The game will loosely follow the plot of the movie, but will omit the flashbacks to the life of young Vito Corleone. Robert Duvall is doing voice work, and all the stars of the original film except for Al Pacino have signed off on the use of their likenesses.
Paramount will release a two-disc Iron Man DVD on September 30. The set will include Robert Downey Jr’s screen test (they made him test? Ouch.), “a seven-part making-of documentary and a six-part feature on the origins of the Marvel superhero.”
Last week we talked about the video gaming shame of Steven Spielberg, but what’s on the flipside of the Spielberg/Lucas gaming coin? George Lucas founded LucasArts some 26 years ago, and it’s still going strong. Lucas clearly had some sort of video gaming mojo that continues to vex Spielberg to this day. Although what’s even odder is that many of LucasArts’ games never crossed over into the movie realm, so maybe the duo has some sort of dual blessing/curse going on. Good games, bad movies; good movies, bad games.
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.
A couple of days ago, the new Ghostbusters video game––which features voice contributions from most of the major actors from the franchise and, for all practical purposes, is as close to Ghostbusters 3 as we’re going to get––was presented at Comic-Con. Today, its release is by no means guaranteed. Its publisher, Vivendi Games, recently merged with Activision; Activision Blizzard, the new company formed by the merger, has declined to exercise options on a number of Vivendi brands, including Ghostbusters.
Shia LaBeouf’s drunk driving incident last weekend hasn’t shut down production on the Transformers sequel, but it has thrown a wrench into the proceedings. Whist Drunky McHearthrob takes a month to recover from an hand injury, Josh Duhamel’s scenes have been pushed up.
Oh, these sound like baaaaad ideas: Howard Stern has hired Alex Winter––Yes, Bill from Bill and Ted––to write a remake of Rock n’ Roll High School. How are these two qualified to trample on the love child of The Ramones and Roger Corman? Well, Winter has also written a film about the inventor of Napster, and Howard Stern is also producing a remake of Porky’s. Of course!
Disney’s overall income and revenues are up, even as their summer grosses are––thanks to Prince Caspian not being about pirates or having anything to do with Keith Richards––way down from last year.
Anne Thompson reports that Ben Lyons (son of Jeffrey, E! channel regular, sometime boyfriend of the quiet one from The Hills) and Ben Mankiewicz (grandson of Herman, The Youngish Guy who hosts Turner Classic Movies on the weekends) are expected to be announced as hosts for the movie review show that will replace Ebert and Roeper. In her report, Anne directs a great, deadpan joke at Lyons: “Last year, he hailed I Am Legend as ‘one of the greatest movies ever made.’” Except it’s not a joke, and it’s not funny anymore.
Fox Atomic has bought a pitch about “an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer” from Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat/I’m Alan Partridge writer Peter Baynham will do the script.
Universal will start producing video games in-house, beginning with an adaptation of Wanted. Meanwhile, Paramount is working on developing three games based on modern classics aimed at teen girls: Clueless, Mean Girls and Pretty in Pink.
Video games today are great for recreating scenes from old films (such as The Godfather) and plopping you into the action. But how faithful do a game’s sequences need to be? From the way Sierra Entertainment is advertising its new Ghostbustersvideo game, I guess you want the gaming to be as close to the direction of the original film as possible. Not only does the new trailer for the game include many scenes from the first Ghostbusters movie, it displays side-by-side comparisons of footage from the film and the game. Because what would the game be without a near-identical shot of library catalog cards shot into the air?
Interestingly enough, the game is not actually a total video game remake of Ghostbusters. Instead, it’s “an all new story you won’t see in theaters,” featuring a script by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also wrote both the original and the sequel, and the voices of Aykroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton and Brian Doyle-Murray, all reprising their roles from the films (I understand Sigourney Weaver opting out, but why no Rick Moranis?). Of course, it does require you to battle old favorites, such as Slimer, Gozer, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and Vigo (”master of evil”), but there will also be new villains, including the biggest paranormal problem the Ghostbusters have ever seen.
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.
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The highly anticipated new Ghostbusters game 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.
Brad Pitt 
A couple of days ago, the new Ghostbusters video game––which features voice contributions from most of the major actors from the franchise and, for all practical purposes, is as close to Ghostbusters 3 as we’re going to get––was presented at Comic-Con. Today, its release is by no means guaranteed. Its publisher, Vivendi Games, 
Anne Thompson reports
