[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Danny Bilson, the man once in charge of core games at THQ who exited the company in May last year before its collapse this January, has revealed what he's been working on: a transmedia game/film project that takes inspiration from Telltale's success with The Walking Dead.
The plan is to release three "series", each comprised of several two-hour-long film episodes and several episodic game releases. In his own words, speaking at the GameHorizon conference in the UK today, it's going to be a "high-concept, micro-budget movie and connected game series, primarily [designed] for streaming, where the stories are continued across multiple media with each product supporting the other."
Bilson envisions that people will play the game on the same device as they watch the episodes, be that PC, tablet or anything else with a browser, and that the lifespan of each would be at least a year or so. The same writers and actors will be involved with both, creating unprecedented consistency across the two. Should one of these series take off, Bilson imagines it extending into comics and more, but the scale of the project is low enough to allow for experimentation. "The price of entry is nothing like the kind of dice I was rolling in my last job," he jokes.
He mentioned Telltale's The Walking Dead as an inspiration, expounding admiration for its amazing and unusual approach to interactive narrative - though the game elements of his own project, he says, will be "more interactive", with varied mechanics.
Three separate series are being planned at the moment along "science fiction fantasy horror" themes, and Bilson has partnered with Hellboy and Tomb Raider film producer Lloyd Levin. Bilson himself had a long history in film, TV and comics before coming into games with EA and taking the helm at THQ, working on The Rocketeer, The Flash and much else as a writer, producer and/or director. He's also worked with a few big-name film brands as a games industry executive, handling the 007 and Harry Potter licenses (though he's under no illusions as to the average quality of the movie-game tie-in).
Transmedia has been a buzzword for a while, but so far the only thing to attempt real game/TV crossover is Defiance - and that isn't going brilliantly in terms of how the two are integrated (the game on its own received a 5.9 in our review). But if anyone's well-qualified to make a serious attempt at something that really integrates games, film, TV and comics, it's someone with experience like Bilson's. We can expect to hear more about it in the coming months.
-Source
wrote:Aww... I didn't know that their company failed... 
They're a billion posts of news about this when it happened by Source King and I?