As if in a shadow play of a major Hollywood premiere, photographers pressed up to a procession of film stars strolling into a theater aglow with hype and klieg lights. Keanu Reeves chatted on camera with Access Hollywood and MTV reporters. Will Smith and his wife, the actress Jada Pinkett Smith, waved to onlookers. Carrie-Anne Moss and Laurence Fishburne glittered on a black carpet ordered for the occasion.
The event at Warner Brothers Studios was a sort of coming-out party for Enter the Matrix. No, it's not one of the long-anticipated sequels to The Matrix, the cyber-chic 1999 thriller. It is, instead, a video game.
With a production cost that some industry experts estimate at as much as US$20 million, it is likely to be the most expensive video game yet made. More importantly, the game, laced with an hour of new Matrix film scenes and megabytes of cinematic tricks, represents the closest collaboration so far between the converging orbits of moviemaking and game production in an entertainment universe that is finding new profits, partnerships and possibilities in ever more sophisticated digital technologies.
The game's 244-page equivalent of a shooting script was written by Larry and Andy Wachowski, the brothers who wrote and directed The Matrix for Warner Brothers Pictures as well as two sequels being readied for release this year. (The game's release by Shiny Entertainment is to coincide with the May 15 opening of the first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded.) Similarly, the films' set and custom designers and much of their departments did double duty for the game, as did the movies' famed Hong Kong fight choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping, and the films' lead actors.
"We had a notion to take the stars of the movies and have them play supportive roles in the video game and tell a story that is a companion story to the movies,'" said Joel Silver, the films' producer. Blending the productions, he said, became essential to maintaining the quality and requirements of the "content-driven" projects.
"There are scenes that start in the video game and will complete the movie," he said, noting that the game was conceived to "feel like it's a part and experience of the movie." Some of the plot lines intersect, and one of the player's missions is to get a character to a location pivotal to the story in Reloaded.
Bruno Bonnell, chairman and chief executive of Infogrames, which recently acquired Shiny Entertainment, calls the phenomenon "a revolution in interactive entertainment."
Of her months of work on both the Matrix sequels and the game as the tough hovercraft pilot known as Niobe, Pinkett Smith said, "It's all one project."
Some of the bigger video game developers, like Activision and Electronic Arts, have also been quick to capitalize on securing licenses to movies, gambling millions of dollars on whether movie premises and characters can make top-selling games.
This year, besides Enter the Matrix, game enthusiasts can expect a slew of movie-related video games that are being developed with the increasingly close cooperation of the moviemakers and actors.
Even Disney's Piglet's Big Movie, due in theaters March 21, is being accompanied by a video game, Piglet's Big Game, made by Gotham Games. It took advantage of Disney's willingness to help blur the line between movie and game by giving both the same look, feel and vocals, said Greg Ryan, general manager of Gotham Games.
RSS