The New York Times website has a great article(log-in required) concerning Peter Jackson's extremely close involvement with the videogame conversion of his forthcoming King Kong movie. Apparently, the director, a keen gamer, was especially enthusiastic about the project as it's being handled by Ubi Soft's Michel Ancel, previously responsible for the cult adventure title, Beyond Good and Evil (a favourite of Jackson and many readers of this blog - see the comments to my 'Great games without sequels' post).
Jackson apparently shipped key members of the game's design team over to New Zealand and gave them dense background info on the film, introducing new creatures and discussing design features he'd like to see in the interactive version of his giant gorilla interpretation.
Perhaps almost as interesting, though, were comments regarding EA, the publisher behind the Lord of the Rings videogame conversions...
According to the article:
Mr. Jackson, said close associates, chafed at his dealings with the industry heavyweight, Electronic Arts, during the making of the Lord of the Rings games. "Electronic Arts was not interested in input from the filmmaker," but later marketed the games as if he were closely involved, said Ken Kamins, Mr. Jackson's manager.
Oh EA, you are naughty.
I'm not sure that director involvement in game tie-ins is going to be the panacea that the article almost makes it out to be. Jackson, for example, seems to see the game as a means of fleshing out the Kong universe - just as Enter The Matrix was an extension of that movie trilogy's through-story... But should games have to fulfill this role? Should they become another plaything of the obsessively controlling auteur overseeing his lucrative multimedia brand?
Or should they just try to be good interactive entertainment? I don't remember Rare worrying about how their GoldenEye conversion could bulk out the movie's story, but that turned out pretty well, didn't it?
