Metal Gear Solid movie in production at Columbia Pictures with Marvel Studios founder at the helm

Avi Arad, the that made X-Men, Spider-man and Iron Man the billion dollar franchises they are today, is working on a Metal Gear Solid movie.

Metal Gear Solid’s narrative legacy is dubious at best. Hideo Kojima’s games are well known for their cinematic pretensions—Ridiculous camera angles, theatrical fights, and expansive monologues on the nature of war and humanity that would make Aaron Sorkin blush. The 1998 PlayStation game was responsible for a generation of long cutscenes and military melodrama. People have fool heartedly pointed to the series as proof that games are storytelling equals to movies for nearly 15 years. Now Metal Gear Solid will complete its journey towards non-interactivity and become a movie.

During the Metal Gear 25^th Anniversary event in Japan that saw Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes announced for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Kojima Productions and Konami announced a new partnership with Columbia Pictures to bring the series to movie theaters. Marvel Studios producer Avi Arad, the man responsible for finding funding for some of the best comic book movies (Iron Man), as well as some of the absolute worst (The Punisher), is producing Metal Gear Solid. That brings Arad’s total video game adaptations in planning to 4 as he’s also working on Mass Effect, Uncharted, and inFAMOUS movies as well.

Arad sees promises that he’s bring video games to theaters with the same level of success, or at least frequency, that he did with comic book adaptations. “For many years I fought to bring comics to theaters,” said Arad at the event, “Comic books are not the biggest genre in cinema. Video games are the comic books of today. We will take our time and tell the story with all the nuances, ideology, and cautionary tales needed.”

So expect the movie to also feature men going to the bathroom in their pants and diaper-wearing monkeys.

It’s anyone’s guess if this movie will actually get made. Kojima first announced a Metal Gear Solid movie all the way back in 2006, working with movie producer Michael De Luca. De Luca was director of production at New Line Cinema during one of its most fruitful periods in the ‘90s, working on films like Seven, Dark City, Boogie Nights, American History X, and, um, Little Nicky. Konami got skittish about a subpar movie ruining the series’ reputation, so it stopped De Luca’s production in 2010.

Good thing it’s got the producer of Bratz: The Movie and Blade Trinity on board for Metal Gear now.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Marvel Heroes director talks PvP, in-game auction house, and Diablo

David Brevik discusses how to make a world with more than one Spider-man, Diablo 3-style auction houses, and PVP in a new interview.

Gazillion Entertainment president David Brevik is an interesting figure in the modern video game landscape. His current project is Marvel Heroes, a free-to-play MMO based on Marvel Comics. All of them. Every super hero from the pantheon, from the X-Men to Spider-man to Rocket Raccoon, is in his new loot-focused role-playing game. Even with Iron Man and Wolverine on board though, tackling the loot RPG market is a dicey proposition in a year when Diablo III owns the field.

Brevik’s the man to do it though. After all, he created Diablo. During his tenure as Blizzard North president, Brevik acted as lead designer and lead programmer on both Diablo and Diablo II. He’s also responsible for Blizzard’s worst game ever, the Super Nintendo super hero fighter Justice League Task Force. So he’s got a lot to prove with Marvel Heroes: First, that he can make a free-to-play loot RPG as accessibly addictive as his classic series and that he’s going to do super heroes right.

In a new interview with Spong, Brevik addressed the problem of making an MMO where every player may want to play as the same character. How do you convince people to play as weird characters like Speedball when they just want to be Spidey? You don’t. “It’s pretty well balanced as each one of the characters has been designed to be played with differing styles. So the way that my Spider-man plays may be different in the way your Spider-man plays. This is something I did when working on Diablo and Diablo II, as for example the Amazon I decided to go with bows for her and then spears and things like that.”

How will people pay for those perks though? Since Marvel Heroes is a free to play game, some expect that kitting out a character might include paying out the nose in a real money auction house like the kind in Diablo III. “The auction house stuff that Marvel Heroes will have will be much more similar to a traditional MMO,” says Brevik, “It will be more akin to World of Warcraft where you put something up in the auction house. We’re going to have a lot of items that actually bind to your character so a lot of the best items you can’t really sell them so that’s our philosophy on the issue of item acquisition.”

Brevik also teased Player vs. Player content for the super hero MMO. “[PvP] would be a lot of fun, wouldn’t it?”

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com