To get some more information on tomorrow's announcement of the Rubik's World title for Wii and DS, which will be published in the fall by The Game Factory, we conducted two separate interviews. We spoke first with the game's Dutch developers: Two Tribes managing director Martijn Reuvers, and the company's creative director Collin van Ginkel, who also serves as lead designer on Rubik's World. We also spoke with with David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, which owns the Rubik's Cube IP. Here's what they had to say:

Whose idea was it to make a Rubik's Cube game?

David Hedley-Jones, senior vice president for the Rubik brand at Seven Towns, credits The Game Factory with the original vision for this licensed videogame. "Game Factory approached us," he says. "They were obviously aware that there's a whole new craze going on about Rubik, which has been building over the last four or five years, reaching a critical mass last year in 2007 and carrying on this year as well. It's a great time to get involved with a brand and an iconic image that's appealing to a whole new young generation."

I want to know more about the game, but this Rubik's Cube revival is interesting. Did Seven Towns drive that, or did it happen more organically?

"It was fairly organic, to be honest," says Hedley-Jones, citing the slew of programs at the turn of the century that looked back at significant pop culture events, many of which devoted time to the Rubik's Cube. He also points to the independent World Cube Association, which bills itself as an organization which "governs competitions for all puzzles labeled as Rubik puzzles, and all other puzzles that are played by twisting the sides, so-called 'twisty puzzles'." He adds: "It's also been featured a lot in movies and advertising in particular over the last five or six years, which obviously creates a great brand awareness."

Advertising? You mean like that Playstation 3 launch commercial?

Absolutely. "They came to us and asked us if they could use the Cube in their advert," says Hedley-Jones. And in a wonderfully recursive example of life imitating art imitating life, Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin told us that when his company and developer Two Tribes went to pitch the Rubik's World concept to Seven Towns, one of the pieces of video they showed was that very same PS3 ad. "The commercial with the PS3, where you see actually the Cube being deconstructed, is the ancillary idea of our game concept," Sarrazin says.

I'd like to hear from the developers now, thank you very much. Are they Rubik's Cube experts?

To read today's installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below.

At Nintendo's media event in San Francisco a few weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of The Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin. He was there to show off the first of an intriguing series of relaxation games for Nintendo's DS handheld. But as we chatted, Sarrazin casually mentioned another title that had yet to be revealed, this one involving the Rubik's Cube license. The combination of a mainstream brand and an unannounced title was too intoxicating for the Level Up staff to resist, so like Activision and Aerosmith, we locked up this announcement exclusively. We've also scored an interview with the game's developer (Two Tribes) and the owners of the Rubik's Cube intellectual property (Seven Towns), which you can peruse by clicking here.

To read the Game Factory press release that will be crossing the wires tomorrow, click on the link below.

1. FOR...merly dapper Thompson looks haggard after copping GTA IV
2. ALL...things reconsidered: NPR takes a a trip to Liberty City
3. UBI...One day, every major city in the world will have a Ubisoft studio
4. YET...another developer appears to have missed the PCGA memo
5. RND...Don't believe the hype? For $10 million, we say: believe

 Poster for the 2001 film "Antitrust," courtesy impawards.com

Oft-quoted Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter isn't just ubiquitous, he's also multifarious. Did you know that in addition to being a financial wizard (Level 60, no doubt) with 15 years of mergers and acquisitions experience under his belt, he also has a law degree from Pepperdine and a master of laws in taxation? We bring this up because in today's installment of Verbatim, we've got a full-scale legal battle among three parties over the best way to interpret the antirust implications--or lack thereof--in Electronic Arts' proposed acquisition of Take-Two. The combatants are as follows:

• Michael Pachter (see above for his extensive credentials)
• Justin Blankenship, Level Up legal affairs columnist; former Federal Trade Commission lawyer (in the Mergers 2 division, which reviewed mergers in the chemical, technology, and entertainment fields)
• Mark Methenitis, editor-in-chief of the Law of the Game blog; and lawblogger for Joystiq; and a licensed attorney in Texas

We've even got a journalist caught in the crossfire: GamePolitics' Dennis McCauley.

The idea behind Verbatim is that we scour the Internet for what various people have said about a particular topic; isolate the most salient excerpts; and compile them in a single, convenient location for your reading pleasure. To see how these lawyers (and journalist) debated this particular issue, click on the link below.

It's a warm Tuesday night at the Olde Fort Pub in Ft. Thomas, Ky., just across the river from Cincinnati, and the regulars are rolling in with the early spring breeze. The Reds game is on the big screen, but no one is watching. Kid Rock wails from the jukebox, but no one is listening. The pool table is lit, but no one is playing. Instead, the crowd is cheering on Casey Niehues, 23, as she rips off a blazing guitar solo on Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." But Niehues isn't really playing guitar; she's playing Guitar Hero, the wildly popular videogame.

As a virtual GNR plays on the flat screen behind the bar, the petite blonde supplants Slash by pounding colored buttons on the fretboard and strumming the plastic "string" on her ax, a game controller more akin to Fisher-Price than Les Paul. But don't try telling these revved-up rockers they're playing a game. "It's just totally different," insists Clem Fennell. Barmaid Rachel Wallingford hollers over the din: "It makes you feel like a rock star."

But as the band Boston (a Guitar Hero act) might say, it's more than a feeling. It's a cultural high-tech phenomenon that is changing the way we interact with music. Listening and watching aren't enough anymore. Now we want to play along. Millions of us are doing it, including gray-haired gaming newbies who still think Grand Theft Auto is a felony. Since Guitar Hero debuted in late 2005, nearly 15 million copies have rolled out retailers' doors, according to market researcher NPD Group. An additional 1.83 million copies of Rock Band, a new game involving guitar, bass, drums and vocals, have sold since it launched last Thanksgiving. In each game, you play along by pressing color-coded buttons on your instrument in time to colored dots coming at you on the screen. The more dots you hit, the better the song sounds and the more points you earn to get deeper into the 58-song set list. Together, the two multiplatinum hits represent a $2 billion market, analysts say.

Behind this rock-and-roll fantasy is Harmonix, a Cambridge, Mass., game developer staffed by rock-star wanna-bes and game geeks. The creator of Guitar Hero, and now Rock Band, was founded in 1995 by two quirky artists, who turned their musings as MIT Media Lab partners into a booming business. Today, these old college chums, Alex Rigopulos, 38, and Eran Egozy, 36, oversee a staff of more than 200 in the former offices of Harvard's Russian Studies department, where spike-haired and tattooed employees zip around on Razors among the detritus of musical instruments, both real and simulated. "It looks like we're having band practice," says online community manager Sean Baptiste as he strolls past a giant gong used to call staff meetings to order.

Harmonix's history is the classic "Behind the Music" story of the 10-year "overnight" sensation, complete with career setbacks and band breakups. In fact, Harmonix lost the Guitar Hero franchise when game giant Activision bought it, along with the game's plastic guitar maker, two years ago. So Guitar Hero III, the latest version, is now playing for a different company. But Rigopulos and Egozy hooked up with MTV, which acquired Harmonix in November 2006 for $175 million and bankrolled Rock Band. MTV, part of media giant Viacom, gave Rock Band the star treatment, with promotions at the Video Music Awards and even its own "Behind the Music" episode.

Having created a monster market in musical pantomime, the challenge for the gaming glimmer twins is topping themselves. But Rigopulos and Egozy don't seem daunted. Lounging on couches inside the "Star Chamber," a soundproof room where Rock Band plays on a continuous loop on a massive TV, CEO Rigopulos (a rock drummer) looks goth in his black hoodie, while chief technical officer Egozy (a classical clarinetist) looks preppy in his chinos and button-down shirt.

Read the Full Story Here

 Aerosmith singer Steve Tyler in concert

With the rising popularity of rhythm games like SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is it only a matter of time before some acts start going exclusive in exchange for more loot. Ever since Harmonix and MTV Games revealed last year that they would be offering full-length albums for download in Rock Band, followed by Red Octane and Activision's announcement that they planned to build an entire Guitar Hero game around a single band like Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, we've wondered whether the game makers were locking up exclusive rights to featured acts. It hasn't been easy finding out, because the relevant developers and publishers have been surprisingly reticent to discuss this matter.

Still, we persevered, and with an assist from NEWSWEEK business reporter Ashley Harris, we've learned that Aerosmith is indeed exclusive to Guitar Hero for an unspecified period of time. "It's an exclusive deal for this game," Aerosmith publicist Marcee Rondon told Harris. We confirmed this with Tim Riley, Activision's vice president of music affairs, who told us through Activision PR that "I can say that we do have the band exclusively, and their catalogue should be exclusive to us beyond the one or two tracks they had licensed out to Rock Band before we made our deal." (According to MTV's Rhythm Game Track Finder, it's one song: "Train Kept a Rollin'.")

 Line for the midnight release of GTA IV at the GameStop in Herald Square NYC 

It's on days like this that we treasure the advantages of our current form of employment. Grand Theft Aficionados took to the streets of Liberty City New York in the driving rain ahead of GTA IV's midnight launch, but we've already been playing the game for a few days now within the warm, dry confines of Level Up HQ. So while the tired, poor masses yearning to play freely huddled outside the GameStop in Herald Square, we enjoyed a savory meal at BLT Market with two PR reps for the specialty videogame retailer: Chris Olivera of GameStop and Judy Grossman of the company's outside publicity firm, Stanton Crenshaw Communications.

Over dinner, we conversed about new executive hires at GameStop; the company's expansion into Europe; its continuing plans to improve its stores' appeal to women and non-gamers; and a hush-hush new initative that we hope to bring you more details on in the future. Oh, and we also discussed our mutual surprise regarding Rockstar Games securing of co-marketing dollars from both Microsoft and Sony for its 800-pound gorilla, something that Olivera confirmed is highly unusual, because the vast majority of publishers who receive co-marketing support do so from a single platform holder. You might call it Grand Theft Advertising; we call it confirmation that in the battle for number two, the GTA series is a weapon of mass distraction that each side must portray as its very own.

After supper, the three of us made our way to GameStop's Herald Square location.

To read this installment of Page 110 in its entirety, click on the link below.

1. EGO...trip: the third rail of gaming turns into the perfect storm
2. WHO...'s gonna save your soul now? Reflections on GTA IV
3. SUB...versiveness, and videogames: possible or not?
4. ARG...Who would want to play this kind of sick game?
5. RND...The man behind the muxtape revolution

 Electronic Arts' famed "Can A Computer Make You Cry?" print ad, which departing exec Bing Gordon helped create 

Once we got wind last week of William 'Bing' Gordon's impending departure from Electronic Arts, we quickly sought a pre-briefing, to which the PR teams at both Electronic Arts and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers graciously assented. We spoke by phone yesterday evening with Gordon, whose laconic California drawl belies one of the industry's most colorful and outspoken characters. Last night's chat, however, found him in a more contemplative mood, as he looked back at his tenure at EA--where he's credited with everything from creating the EA Sports brand to founding EA's studio system--and forward at the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as he enters the dizzying world of venture capital. To give you a sample of our conversation as quickly as possible, we've given Gordon the Just the FAQs treatment, but we plan to publish a more complete Q&A from our wide-ranging conversation in the days to come.

Why did Gordon decide to leave Electronic Arts for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers?

Three reasons. First, he's comfortable with the partners at Kleiner Perkins. "I've known the leading partners at Kleiner since John Doerr and Brook Byers made a founding investment in Electronic Arts in '82," Gordon told us. "Then Brook went on the board, and Brook was kind of the cool guy on the board; deeply believes in entertainment and entrepreneurial possibilities. So he shaped my thinking about what a board member can be."

Over the last decade, Gordon has stopped by Kleiner Perkins from time to time to see what they've been up to. This, he says, resulted in him being invited to join the boards of such Kleiner Perkins investments as Amazon and Audible. "I kind of have 25 years with them. Like 'em; get my best reading list from them. So that's kind of the first thing: long experience and love for the Kleiner way of doing things."

What's the second reason?

With an empty nest looming as his daughters go off to college, he's been wondering about the second act in his American life. "I've got 15 more years to do something—might be cool to do something else" says Gordon of his thought process. "The first thing that popped into my head was Kleiner. Just unbidden, popped into my mind."

And the third?

To read the rest of today's installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 Bing Gordon (far right) pictured with Jeff Bezos, Will Wright and Robin Williams,  courtesy valleywag.com 

The renowned venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has just announced something that we learned late last week. Electronic Arts chief creative officer William 'Bing' Gordon will join Kleiner Perkins as a partner in June, serving alongside such luminaries as John Doerr, Bill Joy and Al Gore. According to Gordon, with whom we spoke by phone on Sunday evening, the first week of June will be his last at EA before starting at Kleiner Perkins on June 9th. "Being on campus with young people in videogame classes; seeing what they're interested in; seeing what's going on with the Internet turning into new kinds of platforms, from iPhone to Facebook and Amazon Web Services--I've gotten fired up about an all-new ride," Gordon told us when we asked why he was moving on from the company that he helped build into a global power.

That's not all the generally outspoken Gordon had to say. To read our Just the FAQs post with chunks of our conversation, click here. To read Kleiner Perkins' press release announcing his joining the firm, click on the link below.

NEWSWEEK's Sharon Begeley writes this week on videogames as therapy:

If proponents of video and computer games are right, the generation that grew up honing its hand-eye coordination by shooting aliens in Halo should be starting to nail real-life aircraft-carrier landings right about … now. But while studies show that the games can improve visual and spatial skills—and that playing violent ones makes it harder to control anger, especially when someone goads or disses you—only now are scientists studying the games' overall effects on players' hearts and minds. Next week, at the Games for Health Conference in Baltimore, Carmen Russoniello of East Carolina University will report that three nonviolent puzzle and word computer games affect heart rates and brain waves in a way that suggests they might be used therapeutically, such as for treating high blood pressure or depression.

Read the full story here

1. EGO...trip: Page 110's boldfaced names strategy is paying dividends 
2. GTA...IV reviews are in, and the reviewers are calling it a masterpiece...
3. BUT...one observer sees something amiss with IGN's exclusive
4. PS3...Sony's relentless drive towards profitability continues apace
5. RND...Why hasn't there been a "Manimal" or "Matt Houston" movie yet?

 

 Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.
--Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto IV

When Rockstar Games showed the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, people marvelled over the detailed environments, thrilled to the series' return to Liberty City and speculated about just how next-gen Rockstar North's Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 debut would be. For us, our sense of anticipation was built around something entirely different: the prospect of an immigrant story. When MTV's Tracey John interviewed us for the Multiplayer blog, we spoke of ourselves as being liminal people, in the following exchange:

Multiplayer: Do you feel there are any advantages [to being black and covering videogames]? Do you feel you stand out more because of your race?

Croal: Well, there are relatively few of us. So I guess in that sense I stand out. But I think also I stand out because of my dreads. [laughs] I stand out because I work for Newsweek. … [Working for Newsweek] opened a lot of doors. I know that’s not really what you’re asking, but in terms of race I don’t think I found a particular advantage or disadvantage. Professionally I think there is a perspective I have but I wouldn’t attribute it solely to race. I would say that I’m--and I hate to use a big word--but I’d say that I’m a liminal person; people who exist along boundaries or lines sort of in between spaces.

My parents are from Guyana, South America. I was born in Canada. I lived a little bit of my life--when I was two to when I was five--in Guyana. I studied French for 10 years. I grew up in Canada. I moved to the United States for college. I’ve lived in California, D.C., and now in New York. I work at a mainstream magazine covering a niche subject within that magazine. So there’s a way in which I have all of these different perspectives. I’m a black, Canadian immigrant living in the United States of Guyanese descent, right? So there are all of these things that I’ve seen and done and by virtue of how I came into covering this, starting out writing about arts and entertainment, mostly movies, some music, some technology, and bringing that to covering games and being very inspired by everyone from Pauline Kael and John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert--to people who were writing for the Village Voice like Greg Tate and Lisa Jones and really strong cultural reporters who brought multiple perspectives to things. I try to bring that to games.

Now, we don't want to oversell the cultural differences between the English-speaking parts of Canada and the U.S.--let's face it, you export your Hollywood movies and rock/hip-hop while importing our comedians and news anchors, so pop culturally speaking, there are a lot of similarities--but take our word for it that being a double-immigrant has given us a unique-ish perspective on matters large and small. And because of that, we responded strongly to Niko Bellic in a way that certain others may have not.

We say this in search of a way to write thoughtfully about a subject that Rockstar Games is not yet allowing us to write about in any detail: the opening credits to Grand Theft Auto IV.

 Rockstar promotional party for Grand Theft Auto IV at Cielo in New York City 

In the run-up to the Launch of Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games hosted a series of intimate parties at a variety of New York City hot spots. Dubbed "Rockstar Games Presents Music From Grand Theft Auto IV," the events were pitched to us via email by Rockstar PR director Darlan Monterisi as "a rare series of intimate events representing the eclectic musical soundtrack for the upcoming epic crime drama. Each event (listed below) provides an authentic, engaging experience for you to not only experience the sounds of GTA IV first-hand in their organic format, but also an opportunity for one-on-one face time with the artists themselves and select members of the Rockstar Games team." Following a hands-on session with the game's multiplayer back in March (lovingly described in an April post by Kotaku head honcho Brian Crecente), we were given a copy of this flyer...

To read the rest of this installment of Page 110, click on the link below. 

1. EGO...trip: Level Up, government name-checked in the Boston Phoenix
2. EGO...trip: Peasants, pitchforks, power--a look at the hive mind of online forums 
3. 360...adds a bright green light to an otherwise Red Ring-ish quarter for MSFT
4. INS...ide the sausage factory of videogame journalism, sexily
5. MMO...Level Up's cultural columnist calls GTA IV "the next evolution of the MMO"
6. HSG...The hardcasual pleasures of Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds, recounted 
7. RND...Armond goes off. The criterati? Scared to death, scared to look--they shook

 Bill Trinen and Shigeru Miyamoto show Wii Fit to journalists last week in NYC

Last Wednesday, the Level Up staff and one of its colleagues, health writer Anne Underwood, made the two-block trek to the Le Parker Meridien hotel for a private demonstration of Nintendo's upcoming exercise game, Wii Fit. Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America executive vice president of sales and marketing and self-proclaimed "Miyamoto groupie" (more on that in a future Page 110 report) was among our gracious hosts, which put us in a VIP kind of mood. But the star of the show was product marketing manager Bill Trinen, best known as He Who Translates Miyamoto Into English. But until Wii Fit is finally released in North America, he should be known as The Fittest Man In Videogames, for demonstrating how the "game" works at various events.

Asked if we had experienced Wii Fit at previous events, we responded affirmatively, leaving Trinen to demo it and Underwood to try it out, freeing ourselves up to sample the delicious oatmeal raisin cookies that were so incongruously being made available during our preview session of a fitness game. Strange, that. But oh, so tasty.

Despite our reluctance to get our sweat on in front of witnesses, we nevertheless managed to elicit one exclusive scooplet when we asked Trinen whether there were any features that had been added to the North American version of Wii Fit following its Japanese release last year.

To read the rest of this installment of Page 110, click on the link below.

1. EGO...trip: Level Up columnist noted; ditto Page 110 
2. COU...ld this represent EA Sports' next opportunity?
3. HOW...to design videogames that highlight race
4. CON...demned: Criminal Minds, carefully considered
5. TWO...standing up to unthinking critics of GTA IV...
6. MOM...while teens and mothers discuss Rockstar's opus
7. Wii...want to play, but is this really, truly gaming?
8. FMV...Everything old is new again, like full motion video
9. RND...When Samuel Met Charlie, Or, Rose's Last Tape
10. RND...a spirited defense of deux filles, une tasse

 

Whether it's the Knicks and the Lakers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the L.A. Dodgers or Biggie and Tupac, there's always been a rivalry between New York and California. But when it comes to videogames, NY might as well be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Sure, we've got Take-Two, or as we like to call it, The House That Rockstar Built. There's Vicarious Visions, those masters of handheld development. Kaos Studios, which worked on Battlefield for EA and just did Frontlines: Fuel of War for THQ, is also located in our fair state, as are smaller developers like Gamelab, which brought us Diner Dash.

But compared to Northern California (Electronic Arts, Lucasarts, Sega and Namco's U.S. HQs, etc.), which even stole 2K Games from us, and Southern California (Activision, THQ, Warner Bros Interactive, Disney Interactive, Brash Entertainment and more) and, well, it's clear where NYC's interactive inferiority complex comes from. So when we got wind that a brand new publisher was debuting not only in our adoptive state, but a mere subway ride away from Level Up's midtown HQ, we pulled out all the stops to bring you this news--and an exclusive interview with the company's CEO--first.

The publisher in question is GreenScreen Interactive. "It was initially founded by Ryan Brant, Mark Seremet and Susan Cummings," CEO Ron Chaimowitz told us yesterday during an exclusive interview at his SoHo offices. "Mark and Ryan were founders of take-Two Interactive, and Susan was at Take-Two and actually worked with Ryan to build the 2K label very successfully from zero to $400 million over four years." Chaimowitz is himself no slouch, having co-founded GT Interactive Software in 1993 and published such well-known titles as Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and Unreal.

To read the rest of our post on GreenScreen Interactive as well as the full text of the company's press release, click on the link below.

 Poster for the 1978 adult film "Debbie Does Dallas," courtesy idave.com

Last October, when we were looking for someone to explain why a massive launch for Halo 3 wouldn't necessarily get the stalled movie back on track, we wrote: "To answer that question, we turned to former Eidos Interactive president Keith Boesky, an agent whose Boesky & Company client list--includes the Robert Ludlum estate, Clive Barker, Spark Unlimited, Liquid Entertainment and GDH--sits at the nexus of Hollywood and videogames. We met Boesky at the DICE conference earlier this year, and were impressed by his thoughtful fluency in a wide variety of media." Boesky's maiden appearance on this very blog not only won us the notice of the indefatigable Nikki Finke, but confirmed our belief that Boesky's wisdom was worth sharing with our readership.

Since then, Boesky has taken to posting his musings on his own blog, A Tree Falling In the Forest, which we've often linked to in our daily High Score feature since he began posting in January. After periodic email exchanges on various and sundry topics, we asked Boesky if he would write a monthly column for us on his observations about the intersection of mass culture and game culture. He agreed, and we're extremely pleased to present his monthly column, Reports From the Front. In his debut, he expands on an offhand comment he made to us following his Halo movie post: that videogames not only have less cultural currency than comic books, they arguably have less cultural currency than porn. Take it away, Keith.

I once told N'Gai that society at large perceives games much as it does porn. My reasoning is simple: everyone looks, but no one will admit it. You would be just as likely to pick up a woman in the bar and ask her to come home to see your porn collection as you would to invite her back to see your kick-ass gaming set up. The likelihood of either achieving the intended goal is very low, and one would get you slapped before she walked away in disgust.

Then again, after thinking it through, I may be wrong. You may be more likely to choose porn. Applying the nine out of ten rule, nine out of ten women will say no to either proposition, but would you really rather have the one who says yes to games come home with you?

While it is easy to see the comparison, it is much harder figure out why. So when he asked me to expand on the thought and write a piece, it took me a while to figure out what to say. All I can do is talk on a personal level about a life in a career my parents don't understand and living on the receiving ends of disapproving stares everywhere from cocktail parties to school open houses.

I don't really know how we got to this point. Maybe it's because games are still considered toys. Even though most households own a game console, the vast majority of people consider videogames to be for kids. But if this misconception were the genesis of the low regard, Mickey Mouse would be mentioned in the same breadth as Jenna Jameson. He is mostly for kids, but adults don't put him in a porn box, and they are also willing to sit down and watch it with their kids. Some women may not even be offended if you asked them back to your place to see your digitally remastered "Steamboat Willie." But when it comes to games, Fox News has no qualms about backing journalist Geoff Keighley into a corner over the "Debbie Does Dallas"-meets-"Star Wars" content--content which is not even contained in Mass Effect. There must be another reason.

To read the rest of Boesky's column, click on the link below.

 The Hospital Fees mini-game from Bright Light and EA's Monopoly

After we spent a good 20 minutes playing Electronic Arts' Hasbro, we were intrigued enough by it to set up an interview with the developers at EA's Bright Light studio in the U.K. On Friday, we spoke by phone with creative director Matt Birch and producer Darren Potter. We'll try to bring you the entire interview at a later date, but for now, here's a sample of what we discussed in another installment of Just the FAQs.

Monopoly has been around forever. What's different about this?

The highlight of EA's Monopoly is a mode that they're calling The Richest. "The idea with The Richest was to take advantage of the speed of computing to make a game that a modern family could sit down and play in 20 or 30 minutes," says Matt Birch, the game's creative director. Think of it as the speed chess version of the game you know and love.

Interesting, but vague. How does it work?

For The Richest, your goal is still to amass the most wealth, but here, you keep score with assets. The more properties you own, the richer you are. When you land on a property that no-one owns, it's yours. But when you land on a property that someone else owns, you have to give them one of your properties as rent--and vice-versa.

I get that. But what's with the speed chess analogy?

To read the rest of this installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 Monopoly, developed by Bright Light and published by EA Casual 

Last week at a media event in New York City, Electronic Arts unveiled its take on Hasbro's enduring Monopoly. It's currently in development for Wii, 360 and PlayStation 2, with the Wii serving as the lead platform. The game will be released this fall by the EA Casual division, at the same time as the relaunch of Hasbro's board game Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition, so named because Hasbro is retiring such famous spots as "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" with the names of cities from around, um, the world. We played it at the event, where EA's reps were focused on showing off The Richest, a new spin on Monopoly that blends mini-games with a sped-up version of the classic gameplay for a clever, highly entertaining version of Monopoly whose playtime is measured in minutes, not hours. See below for the press release, and be sure to check back for the newest installment of our Just the FAQs interview series, in which we speak with the title's U.K. developers.

To read EA's press release, click on the link below.

 

As we said in today's announcement, former guest poster Justin Blankenship has graciously agreed to join Level Up's select stable of monthly columnists. In his first post, he applied the insights he gained during his 2001-2004 tenure in the Federal Trade Commission's Mergers 2 division in Washington, D.C., to suss out the antitrust implications of Electronic Arts' intended purchase of Take-Two Interactive. Blankenship declared that the the FTC would likely take a hard look at the deal, and while some were skeptical of his analysis, he was proven right last week when his former employer issued a Second Request for more information on the proposed deal. In his debut monthly column, Blankenship returns to the EA/Take-Two imbroglio to answer some questions that others raised in response to his earlier post and shed some light on the thought process behind the FTC's recent decision. read on.

First of all, thank you to everyone who read my piece about EA's potential acquisition of Take Two, and especially to those of you who took the time to cover the piece or otherwise comment on it. Now that the FTC has issued a Second Request to EA and is clearly taking a hard look at the merger, this seems like a good time to recap where this deal is, and follow up on some interesting points that were raised.

1. "What is a 'Second Request' and what does this mean for EA/Take Two?"

A little background on how the merger review process works is helpful here. Under a law called the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 (HSR), any merger or tender offer that exceeds a certain monetary threshold is required to file a Notification and Report Form with both the FTC and the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. The Form includes a description of the deal, the parties to the deal, and attaches certain documents relevant to the deal for government review.

Most importantly, the HSR filing starts a 30-day clock running for the government to review the deal during which it is illegal to consummate the merger. The vast majority of deals go through after this 30-day period, or even earlier if the parties have requested an "early termination" of the waiting period.

A much smaller p