George Miller, the film director behind the Mad Max movies, has confirmed that a video game based on the latest in the series, Fury Road is due to be developed, while also revealing that he has acquired the next game from former Team Bondi founder Brendan McNamara.
The veteran film producer revealed the news in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, while his business partner Doug Mitchell explained that while it is "not immediately obvious," the video game industry is "massive" and the duo are planning to get development on both of these games underway.
McNamara's next game is called Whore Of The Orient, explained Miller, although he did not go into details regarding what style the game will take.
Miller explained, "[Games are] four-dimensional storytelling. A game can literally become the equivalent of a novel."
"If you talk to Brendan [McNamara], who is the brilliant mind behind this, it's all the same issues as film. Instead of writing a 100-page screenplay, he wrote a 2800-page screenplay. But it's the same dialogue, acting, blocking, wardrobe, costume, lighting, vehicle simulations. It's a movie that's played interactively at home."
Mitchell added, "With the government's support we can immediately go forward with two games."
"It's not immediately obvious but the potential in the video games sector is massive. Just from the statistics people are showing me, it's a $60 billion industry fast-tracking towards $90 billion."
I sure can't wait to work on this project for 7 years under a tyrannical manager, get left out of the credits and get fired as soon as the game ships! Oh boy!
Also- can hype materials for games stop comparing arbitrary numbers (If 2,800 pages is better than 100, than a 2,000,000 page screenplay must automatically be a *masterpiece*) like it actually means anything? Aren't we past this as an industry?
I'm reminded of the "wake" for Ultima IX, where they took a 6-foot-high stack of design docs, drove a stake through them, and lit a huge bonfire under them.
"With the government's support we can immediately go forward with two games."
I think we're reaching a point where game developers - the actual developers, not the managers - need to campaign against government grants to stop enabling people like this. It's especially easy to mistreat everyone when it doesn't matter if your company fails.
That's a rather odd comment, since the country with the least direct government subsidies - the USA - is the one with the weakest (i.e., non-existent) employee-rights laws.
"It's a movie that's played interactively at home."
I cut Miller some slack on this with his background in film. It's natural to try to understand new things in the context of what you already know well.
But I hope if he spends time in the game development industry he'll choose to make not movies with some viewer input, but games that fully exploit the unique interactivity offered by modern personal computers.
"Whore of the Orient" is really a terrible name for a game but it was how Shanghai was named in the 1920s and 30s when opium and brothels were rampant over there. They might have called it "Shanghai Noire" as well, I guess.
Anyway , it may also imply that Mr. McNamara will make every dev his bitch for the next 7 years and remembers me of the ads for the infamous Daikatana back in the day: "John Romero's about to make you his bitch"! Will the games share the same fate?
Also- can hype materials for games stop comparing arbitrary numbers (If 2,800 pages is better than 100, than a 2,000,000 page screenplay must automatically be a *masterpiece*) like it actually means anything? Aren't we past this as an industry?
http://www.ultima-ascension.de/ix/artikel_wakeheld01.php
I think we're reaching a point where game developers - the actual developers, not the managers - need to campaign against government grants to stop enabling people like this. It's especially easy to mistreat everyone when it doesn't matter if your company fails.
I cut Miller some slack on this with his background in film. It's natural to try to understand new things in the context of what you already know well.
But I hope if he spends time in the game development industry he'll choose to make not movies with some viewer input, but games that fully exploit the unique interactivity offered by modern personal computers.
And again, Australia is focused on the number of pages (in a screenplay) instead of making something that is FUN.
Anyway , it may also imply that Mr. McNamara will make every dev his bitch for the next 7 years and remembers me of the ads for the infamous Daikatana back in the day: "John Romero's about to make you his bitch"! Will the games share the same fate?