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In their own words: Chris Dyl, CTO, Turbine Inc.
What if the imagination of a video game developer became the seed bed for a crop of Hollywood epics and TV series? And what if movie and TV directors left the backlot to build video games?
Massachusetts companies are betting these developments are around the corner. Between film production and video game development lies fertile ground for New England’s peculiar blend of expertise in graphics software and large data problems.
“The industries are definitely converging,” said Brett Close, president and CEO of Maynard-based 38 Studios LLC, which he hopes can turn the typical model on its head, by spinning film and book franchises out of video game characters and stories. That’s been done before, but Close plans to do it better.
He talked about the emotional impact of the first few minutes of the Star Trek feature film released last month, where a ship’s captain sacrifices himself to save his crew and his family. “A lot of people don’t understand that’s possible in video games,” he said. “You imagine those kinds of sequences; by the way, you can embed them in video games.”
Starting in about 2004, a repurposing of computer graphics processing units (GPUs) allowed personal computers and consoles to render film-quality images in a fast-moving video game. Some developers were shy of the new coding paradigms required to handle the data, said GenArts Inc. chief scientist Gary Oberbrunner.
In 1997, Oberbrunner joined GenArts as the Cambridge-based visual effects software company’s second employee, after Karl Sims founded it in 1996. For these two, who had worked together coding for massively parallel supercomputers at Thinking Machines Inc. on First Street in Cambridge, the new graphics paradigm felt very familiar.
“In a way, for us, this is like back to the future,” Oberbrunner said of the heavy processing now involved in video game graphics.
On Monday, GenArts announced a partnership with Lucasfilm Ltd. The California film studio will use GenArts software in the reverse of 38 Studios’ formula. Lucasfilm hopes using a standard set of tools will help carry its films’ emotional content through movie-based games to be produced in-house.
Now, games and films tend to appeal to disparate audiences, said Lucasfilm chief technical officer Richard Kerris, but that line is already blurring. Many video games already contain cinematic episodes that draw players into the story line as a passive viewer.
“The cinematics in games are sometimes 20 minutes or an hour long,” he said. “If you just took the cinematics in the game, it’s a film. And if you say ‘I now want to interact with this film,’ it’s the game.”
Lucasfilm already has a good reputation for spinning out good games, going back to the original Star Wars arcade game of the 1980s. But other than that, movie-to-game successes have been rare, said Jon Radoff, CEO of Cambridge-based video game social network GamerDNA Inc.
Kerris believe that in the future, games based on sagas like George Lucas’ Star Wars won’t be an afterthought to the films but will become increasingly integral to plot and character development.
In the world of television game shows and online ‘casual’ video games, audience demand is leading convergence — and they’re already ahead of what most TV producers and game makers are providing, said WorldWinner Inc. president Peter Blacklow.
WorldWinner’s Newton offices have become the digital headquarters of California-based parent company Game Show Network LLC (GSN), which acquired the casual game developer in 2007. Now, most game shows on GSN include an invitation to play online, and WorldWinner’s online games, such as Catch 21, have led to popular TV franchises.
“You’ve got a loyal game show audience on television,” he said. “You can imagine the person that’s shouting out the answer on Jeopardy. The overwhelming desire we hear is, ‘Well, I want to be a contestant.’”
Like game show fans, audiences of movies such as Star Wars and Star Trek may expect to be able to play out the plot lines in video games. But with the ability to reproduce in games the most powerful cinematic visual effects of a movie, the franchising of games may soon spread to movies like “The Perfect Storm,” Oberbrunner said. “They’re only just dipping their toe in the water (of what’s possible),” he said.
CAD CONNECTION
California-based Autodesk Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK) is known for its computer-aided design software for architects and product engineers. But the company makes a suite of two-dimensional design tools used widely in both the game and film industries.
Massachusetts’ CAD talent pool has made Autodesk’s new Waltham facility, opened last month, a recruiting center for graphics employees, said Phil Bernstein, vice president of building industry strategy and relations.
“The problem sets are very similar,” he said. Game and film software developers work hard to reproduce real sunlight — a capability architects prize when designing green buildings, Bernstein said. “Vice versa, when the guys on the media and entertainment side want to build a city they can drive a car through, they use (CAD) tools to create the buildings in the game.”
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