I have been hearing for years that Battlestar Galactica was one of the best TV shows perhaps ever made. I figured it was really good but just never took the time to watch it. Then at last year’s E3 I saw that the German free to play online gaming company Bigpoint was announcing that their first US product and partnership, with now majority owner NBC Universal (also owner of the SyFy Channel) is producing the free to play browser based MMO of BSG and developing it with the Unity 3D engine (which I’m a huge fan of) to boot.
I got in on the closed beta of the game and saw this as the perfect excuse to get caught up and watch all the episodes of BSG. Well I’ve been watching at least a few episodes a week now for months and have not been in the slightest bit disappointed. BSG has truly become one of my favorite shows of all time and I still have about 35%-40% of the series left to watch.
So at this year’s GDC I was really excited to see a panel at the Social Games Summit on IP’s & Brands including a talk from one of the BSG MMO Team at Bigpoint, Robert Ollet. There were four games presented and each speaker explained that on their current project the owners of the brand were a lot more cooperative and offered a lot more freedom than in the past. One obvious reason for this is that brand holders now have evidence that games particularly online are big business and a way to drive major revenue if done correctly.
It seems the old brick and mortar studios are starting to wake up to the possibilities of transmedia. It used to be that the movie studio would sell the license to a video game publisher to make the game and then restrict the developer in all sorts of ways creatively. Also what we would usually get as a result would be a rushed subpar game that would just be a poor representation of whatever went on in the movie.
Mr. Ollet shared that he and his team had access to all of the BSG concept art, even stuff that was never used in the show. The MMO takes place after the show ends as opposed to trying to replicate the timeline of the show. This way the players and creators are off in new territory and have the opportunity to contribute to the lore. This I find very exciting because it truly gives the players the power to contribute to the mythos that they love in a way that has never really been possible before.
Also the game development is informing the new “Blood & Chrome” series that chronicles the story of young Admiral Adama and the first Cylon war which is in production and set to premiere this fall. As the game develops new ships and Cylon units ( players need ways to distinguish their toaster avatars) those designs just may find themselves in the show with the story explanation that they got “moth balled” after the first war.
This topic was echoed last week at the LA Game Conference where I heard several speakers share stories pointing to what I see as a new emerging strategy, which is to take a IP or world which is rich enough and develop it as a game, TV show, film, comic books simultaneously and have the creators in each media take a piece of the world or timeline and freely develop their own vision as opposed to each media creator trying to replicate and be constrained by what the others are doing. I think that this is definitely the way to go. I do think that someone has to be responsible, most likely the creator for making sure all the pieces fit together, but when they do I think there is a tremendous potential for a greatly satisfying, rewarding and unprecedented experience for both creators and fans.
No comments:
Post a Comment