The stories for this week:
- Uncharted Movie Coming
- Mortal Kombat Film Producer Sues Midway
- EA Merges BioWare and Mythic, Mark Jacobs Out
- ZeniMax Media (Bethesda) Acquires id Software
- Call of Juarez Highlights Weak Gaming Week
Uncharted Movie Coming
No big surprise here. A well written game with lots of dialog and action is making its way to the silver screen. Columbia Pictures has hired a writer, Kyle Ward, to do the screen treatment for the movie. No idea when the movie will be shot or come out since Ward recently completed a treatment for Kane and Lynch and was recently hired to do the treatment for Hitman 2. This move could be a good or bad thing, I certainly hope it is the former though.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Mortal Kombat Film Producer Sues Midway
Midway’s misery never seems to end. Mortal Kombat film producer Lawrence Kasanoff has sued Midway for the intellectual property rights to the franchise. He feels the movies have brought to life stock characters like Liu Kang, Scorpion and others. H also feels that allowing Warner to buy the IP along with everything else for $33 million is a bad move for down the road should Warner want to make a movie. We’ll see how this goes, but I have to believe the man hasn’t seen the backstory and fleshing out of the story throughout all the games, he makes Ed Boon’s team seem like they’ve given the characters no life.
Source: Colony of Gamers
EA Merges BioWare and Mythic, Mark Jacobs Out
Wednesday was a weird day with two major mergers or acquisitions having happened. EA announced that BioWare and Mythic are being merged into the EA RPG/MMO Group, but they will keep their names on the game. BioWare’s founders become the Group General Manager and Group Chief Creative Officer of the new group. Mythic’s Rob Denton will become CEO of Mythic and Mark Jacobs was jettisoned. The biggest news was Jacobs being let go and it sounds like the Mythic employees were shocked by it given how much Jacobs had fought for their jobs in the past. I’m sure Mark is going to land elsewhere, but it was a bit of a shock to see him depart. One would also guess that crossover between the two companies will occur on such games as the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic and maybe even BioWare’s other offerings that are coming.
Source: Colony of Gamers
ZeniMax Media (Bethesda) Acquires id Software
In arguably bigger news, id Software was acquired by ZeniMax (Bethesda) this week. They will keep their independence, but are now under the publishing arm of Bethesda and will likely share resources with that company and vice versa. This acquisition will not affect the upcoming Raven Software developed Wolfenstein game from Activision or id’s own RAGE being produced by EA. After that everything will be published under Bethesda, such as DOOM 4 and Quake 5, rumored titles being worked on by id at the moment. This could be a good move for id, but it has certainly raised money questions to many people. Another independent developer no longer holding its own.
Source: Colony of Gamers
Call of Juarez Highlights Weak Gaming Week
Only title of note this week except for some movie tie-ins (Ice Age and Harry Potter) is Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood from Ubisoft. The prequel to the original game may see some uptick on sales given it is really the only game in town this week. I never played the first game, but am looking forward to this one for some reason. Ubisoft has really been putting out the trailers for the game and with Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar being pushed back, this becomes a key Western game.
Source: me