Gevonden is een interessant interview met Douglas Perry, redacteur bij IGN.com en Jillian Goldberg, verantwoordelijke voor product marketing bij Electronic Arts. Zij hadden het het afgelopen weekend met The Calgary Herald over games die gebaseerd zijn op filmklassiekers.
In de bespreking hebben beide het onder andere over de reden waarom developers films omzetten in gamevorm:
“The developers behind these titles are all in their mid-30s and all grew up watching these movies,” aldus Douglass Perry. “Publishers believe that video games are now entering into the mainstream more than ever, and I think they want to put games out based on the movies that they saw when they were growing up. But they also want to embrace the movie industry with reckless abandon, because they think that’s the entryway to video game heaven. But we’re already there — video games are a more lucrative and powerful medium than movies.”
Een game van Electronic Arts is Godfather, wie kent de nummer 1 op IMDB niet? Uiteraard heeft EA veel research gedaan naar de populariteit van deze film en een eventuele game die zich hierop baseert:
“We did a lot of research to determine if The Godfather resonates with this audience, whether 18-year-olds would be as aware of it as 30-year- olds. And we got amazing results back from both America and Europe about the awareness and viewership of the film. It was something like 92 per cent of North Americans we had polled had seen one of the Godfather movies in the past year, and something like 70 per cent for the European market. And unsolicited, these people started telling us what they wanted to see in a Godfather video game, which really solidified it for us.”
EA heeft in ieder geval wel vertrouwen in The Godfather, dat blijkt ook wel uit deze woorden:
“We would expect a game like The Godfather to do extremely well. But you have to remember, this is the gaming industry, not movies or music. If the game sucks, even if it’s got a great license, it’s not going to sell.”
