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.

 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'.")

 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.

 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.

 

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.

We've never quite been able to appreciate the phenomenon that is Second Life. Nevertheless, even the metaverse-averse like ourselves can appreciate the wizardry involved in our exclusive video demonstration of Second Life on a mobile phone. That wizardry is made possible by a startup called Vollee, which is capable of serving up games whose graphics and CPU requirements are more demanding than a typical phone can handle to the Vollee client which users install on their handsets. The folks at Vollee remap the menus and controls for each game to optimize them for the smaller screen and the limited controls. During a recent demonstration at Level Up HQ, we saw a PS2 board sports game running reasonably well on a phone. We'll have more coverage of Vollee in the weeks to come, as well as our thoughts on the implications of this technology, but for now, enjoy the video.

 A mock-up of the Kaplan SAT Prep DS, under development by Aspyr Media

Oh, Brain Age: what have you wrought?

Later today, Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (a division of Kaplan, which is in turn owned by Newsweek's own parent company, The Washington Post Company) will announce that it is partnering with Aspyr Media to develop an as-yet-untitled SAT test prep game for the Nintendo DS. Versions for Windows-based PCs and Macs are also in development. According to Aspyr co-founder Ted Staloch, Aspyr reached out to Kaplan Test Prep last summer to see if the two companies might be able to work together on a game that would hit the sweet spot of Brain Age fans and students studying for the SAT. "This is not a study break," Staloch told us last week during a phone interview. "This is a way to prepare for the test."

Staloch and Kaplan's director of pre-college programs Kristen Campbell were reticent to share many details, as the game is still early in development. Campbell did say that part of the appeal to Kaplan was the ability to reach young people through videogames, just as it has done via iTunes and manga. "The reality is that for a lot of students, the way they study has changed," says Campbell. "This is a great way to supplement our tutoring or classroom programs."

As the caption says, the image above is a mockup of what the game's menu will look like, as well as its main character. We asked Aspyr for more detail about the main character; here's what the publicist told us via email:

 The song list menu for Rock Band PS3 

Despite the PlayStation 2's utter dominance during the previous console cycle, we began to notice a trend emerging from casual conversations with developers: many of them were doing the bulk of their gaming on the Xbox. When asked, said game makers cited a variety of reasons, including better graphics, a wider selection of first-person shooters, and, of course, the superior online functionality of Xbox Live. This developer gap has only become more pronounced with the Xbox 360's yearlong head start and Sony's shockingly un-integrated Playstation Network feature set. We've spoken with a number of developers who don't even own PS3s; among those who do, several use it as nothing more than a Blu-Ray player. What's more, we've been to countless press events where third-party publishers are demonstrating their multiplatform games with nary a PS3 in the house. And when inquiries are made about its absence, we're greeted with a look that's either sheepish or knowing, as if it's now simply taken for granted that the PS3 version is of course lagging behind its Xbox 360 counterpart. Such is the state of PS3 development among third parties today.

We bring this up because, in our persistent state of naivete, we made yesterday what we thought was a simple request of Harmonix's PR firm.

To read the rest of this post, and to see the remainder of the screenshots for the PS3 version of Rock Band's in-game store, click on the link below.

In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Australian writer-director-producer George Miller, he discussed why he wanted to step up his level of involvement in videogames; how he met Cory Barlog; and what areas of common ground he sees between the two media. In Part II, Miller explains why he's starting work on the Mad Max videogame long before the movie goes into production; why he believes the game will benefit from his longtime process of workshopping new creative endeavors; and whether he'll be seeking a leadership role on the videogames for all of his future movie projects. Read on.

Do you already know the first game project that you and Cory will be working on?

Well, the first one will be a "Mad Max" game. Because what happened was, we were all ready to go, within eleven weeks of shooting the next "Mad Max" movie, "Fury Road." This was way back when the war in Iraq started, and that really threw this out for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was that the American dollar crashed against the Australian dollar. And apart from that, just insurances, getting vehicles and stuff there on container ships--all that slowed down around the world. So we had to move on to "Happy Feet," because that was going to take a long time.

We were all ready to go on "Fury Road," but instead of going off and shooting "Fury Road" straight away, I said "Okay, now that we've got that whole world prepared, let's work together with somebody, if there's someone out there." And that started off on the path of trying to get together with Corey. Not handing it off to some third party game developer as we did on "Happy Feet," but to try to do it all as a piece, in the hope that we overcome that problem of making bad films from good games or vice versa.

I realize that the schedule for making a live action movie, even one like "Mad Max" which I'm guessing these days would now have a lot of CG in it--

Yes.

--those schedules for movies and games are very different. What stage of production is the movie in? Would it be apt to say that it's in an advanced stage of preproduction?

The movie was in a very highly advanced stage of preproduction when we stopped it. It's all prepared, but now I want to stop and do the game and get those schedules in sync.

Okay.

In other words, I'm delaying the movie in order to do a really good game. Normally what happens everyone's scrambling to finish a game so it can coincide with the release of the movie. In this case, because I've got another couple of movies to make, we can wait and do it properly. That's the theory.

 Writer-director-producer George Miller

After a few weeks of mutually-instigated international phone tag, spanning mid-December to mid-January, we finally caught up with writer-director-producer George Miller. Our mission: to get his take on how he'd come to be mobbed up with God of War II director Cory Barlog. And, more importantly, what they would be working on first? Could it be a "Justice League of America" game, set to tie in with the movie which had been put on hold because of the writers' strike? A "Babe: Pig In the City" game for Nintendo's still-sizzling Wii? The answer, when it was revealed, still managed to thrill despite the nonchalance of Miller's delivery: "Well, the first one will be a 'Mad Max' game."

An interactive "Mad Max" epic? With Cory Barlog at the helm? Game, set, match. Or at least that's what legions of fanboys will be thinking--until they remember that licensed games are often less than stellar. But quite aside from the talent involved, our interview with Miller reveals not only the appropriate measure of respect for the medium, but also an understanding of the need to give this game the time it needs in order for it to be good or even great. In Part I of our Q&A, Miller explains how he became interested in working on videogames; the differences and similarities between action sequences and action games; and what it was like watching Barlog play God of War II in their agent's offices at CAA. Enjoy.

How did you become interested in working in video games?

Well, it sort of crept up on me almost imperceptibly. I realized that the kind of filmmaker that I am, I unconsciously try to make films that are as immersive as possible. I tend to use very wide angles and move the camera through space rather than zoom. My cutting patterns and compositions try to exaggerate--well, not exaggerate, but try to enhance a kind of three-dimensionality and an immersive quality to my storytelling. That of course is what games do so well.

The realization was, as I started to work in the digital realm, that film suddenly is able to do things that you weren't able to do before. And once I got into that, like everyone else, I saw the obvious convergence of film towards games and games towards film. So, I got swept along and found myself sort of in a current that was heading towards games.

The other big thing for me was the fact that film is a pretty closed narrative--it moves along at 24 frames a second, it's extremely linear, and in that sense rigid, whereas games bust that open. So in a way, with games being more exploratory, it's closer to what a novelist can do in many ways. A novelist can stop the forward momentum of their story and go explore little cul-de-sacs and then come back again. Games allow you to do that as well. Basically, games and films and just about everything else comes from the heading of storytelling. So it's just another way to tell stories, I think.

It's interesting that you say that, because looking at one of the films you've made in the past like "The Road Warrior"--it was an extremely well-received film, but I think critics would say compared to certain other stories that that wasn't necessarily the most complicated or richest of stories in a movie. Yet, that story and storytelling is probably more involved and more sophisticated than what you get out of most games, if that makes sense.

Yes.

If you look at games as a medium overall, for a lot of games--particularly action games--the story's almost an afterthought. It's almost like a premise; a set-up; an excuse for the action, and then it goes into something else. So it's interesting for someone like yourself, coming out of a storytelling medium, to say this. When you look at storytelling in games, how far along do you feel games are relative to other media when it comes to storytelling?

 Mel Gibson as Mad Max in the 1981 post-apocalyptic film "The Road Warrior"

Coy time is over, Dear Reader. Yesterday, we told you that God of War II director Cory Barlog--who'd left Sony Computer Entertainment last November partway through the development of God of War III--had formed a creative partnership with writer-director-producer George Miller. Today, we can finally reveal what they'll be working on first: a "Mad Max" action-adventure game, inspired by the "Mad Max: Fury Road" movie that Miller had been preparing to shoot in 2003 before the war in Iraq forced him to put everything on hold. Specific details on the gameplay are still fuzzy, as Barlog and Miller are still early in the planning phase, but we can confirm that melee weapons, projectile weapons and vehicles will all be present, just as you would expect. We spoke with Miller by phone in January, who personally informed us that Mad Max would be his first serious videogame venture. Here are some excerpts from our hour-long conversation:

In Part I of our multi-part Q&A with videogame director Cory Barlog, he explained how he met and clicked with Australian writer-director George Miller (of "Mad Max," "Babe" and "Happy Feet" fame), told us why he felt he had to leave Sony Computer Entertainment, and ducked our questions about his first videogame project with Miller. In Part II, he takes us deeper inside his decision to part ways with his previous employer and why he feels that the dominant employer-employee model under which most videogame directors labor is in dire need of change. Read on.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it sounded like what you were saying is that you were having a hard time seeing yourself scaling the same mountain that you had scaled twice before--with God of War and God of War II--under the same conditions. Is that a fair description?

Yeah, yeah, The concept of actually doing the game was definitely not anything that I would feel all that leery about. I wasn't nervous about doing it all, but it was about whether to do it under the sort of same conditions. You know, it's not something that was ever really about money. I know there's been some speculation about that, but it's not necessarily about money. The reality that we live in is that when you look at the idea that you are a pretty large influence on something that has turned out to be a several hundred million dollar franchise for a company, but at the same time you're still not feeling like anything more than just a cog in the machine. And that you're still just, "All right, whatever, they're telling you to do; there's nothing different that can be done; go do that, go do that." You're really feeling like you're not [financially] invested fully in it whereas creatively and mentally and physically you're totally invested in it. Definitely for me, it was not something I wanted to see happen to the rest of my career especially me, getting with all these directors on the film side and seeing the way that they sort of run their careers.

Like I said before I know that the industry can't change overnight; videogame directors are never going to be of that same stature of film directors. That's not even the point. The point is just from a creative standpoint, you've got to be in charge of your own direction and really feel comfortable and happy with each of the things you're doing. And I think that also comes from diversity.

The reason I'm asking this is that David Jaffe said exactly the same thing when I was talking to him about leaving Sony and putting together Eat Sleep Play.

Right.

The larger point is obviously the situation that you've described and your search for freedom, but is there something specific to directing a God of War game that takes people and turns them into these ambassadors for change? Is it like the drummer in "Spinal Tap" or something? What is it about the process of directing a God of War game that makes people finish it and say, "I've got to leave. I've got to control my destiny. I've got to start my own thing. I've got to do my own thing."

 Videogame director Cory Barlog

We first met Cory Barlog in 2005, just before the original God of War was set to arrive in stores back in 2005. Over a soul food dinner at The Shark Bar in Manhattan, we discussed how his role as lead animator on the original game had grown to the point where he'd been tapped to fill David Jaffe's shoes by serving as the director of the inevitable sequel. It was clear from our conversation that he was thrilled to have been given the opportunity to work on a truly great franchise rather than some of the games he'd worked on in the past. And after he knocked God of War II out of the park, we were eager to see what he would do with a potential God of War III on the Playstation 3.

So it came as something of a shock last November when we got a call from a source informing us not only that Barlog would soon announce his departure from Sony Computer Entertainment, but that he would be working with veteran film writer-director-producer George Miller--best known for the "Mad Max" series of movies that starred Mel Gibson--on some videogame projects. We immediately began negotiating with Barlog's representatives to secure on-the-record interviews with Barlog and Miller about their collaboration. This resulted in three interviews that we'll be publishing all week on Level Up. First is our Q&A with Barlog, in which he remains tight-lipped about precisely what he and his new partner's first game would be, but goes into great detail about why he felt he had to leave Sony Computer Entertainment. Next up is our conversation with Miller, who gave up the goods and explained why he's become fascinated with videogames. And finally, we'll publish our follow-up with Barlog, who, freed of the burden of secrecy, provided some terrific insights into how he plans to approach his first post-Sony project. Strap in, sit tight and enjoy.

So Cory, how did you get approached by George Miller? Give me the back story on how you ended up working with him.

Wow, it was a while ago that I got connected with CAA, through other people at [Sony Santa Monica]. I think it was just a random emailing from people that somehow got me connected with Seamus [Blackley, head of Creative Artists Agency's videogame division] and Ophir [Lupu, an agent in the same group]. They just wanted to have a meeting, to talk and hang out, and from that it was kind of like, "Well all right, it would be interesting to get you connected with different people." There was never any specific person that we were talking about connecting with; it was just like, "Let's try talking to some people."

So I met with a bunch of different people and one of them was George, when he was in town. It was funny because when I first met him the first thing I said was, "You know, you really messed me up as a kid, flying, because of that 'Twilight Zone' thing that you did." I don't know if you ever saw that, but the whole thing was very, very, very freaky for me and from that point on I hated flying,because of the whole Jon Lithgow, crazy guy, monster on the plane wing.

You mean the "Twilight Zone" movie?

 

When news broke last November that God of War II director Cory Barlog was leaving Sony Computer Entertainment with God of War III, everyone wanted to know what he planned to do next. Thanks to a well-placed source, we knew half of the story, which we can reveal to you exclusively today: he'll be working with the noted Australian film writer-director-producer George Miller--the man behind such features as "The Witches of Eastwick," "Babe," "Happy Feet," and most notably of all, the "Mad Max" series of movies that starred Mel Gibson--on one or more videogame projects.

What we didn't know, even after an hour-long, previously unpublished interview with Barlog that we conducted last December, is what the two men would be collaborating on. That's because Barlog was being coy, so we held off on publishing anything until we could get more details. A January phone interview with Miller took care of that--as did a subsequent follow-up conversation with Barlog--but we're going to take a page from Barlog's handbook and be coy with you, Dear Reader. Why? To let you experience this epic series of wide-ranging chats as we did, in chronological order, and absorb the implications of this partnership and the potential for others like it as more top videogame creators consider throwing off the shackles of the employer-employee relationship for the promise and peril of the independent contractor.

So tomorrow, we'll publish our world exclusive details of the first collaboration between Barlog and Miller, alongside a Q&A with Miller himself. (Trust us--you won't want to miss it.) But today, we're going focus on our initial December interview with Barlog, which centered around his decision to break away from Sony after the success of God of War and God of War II. Some excerpts: