Former THQ EVP Danny Bilson working on a game-film tie-in with Hellboy producer
Former THQ executive VP for core games Danny Bilson closed out Game Horizon today with keynote, in which he announced a project he has in the works similar to Syfy and Trion's Defiance.
Bilson has enlisted the help of Helloboy and Tomb Raider producer Lloyd Levin for the game-visual media tie-in and a distributor announcement is "very close".
"Lloyd and I got together and we said let's make micro-budget film series for streaming, because the hardware now enables us to play the game and watch the film on the same device," he told the audience as transcribed by Eurogamer.
"And let's launch let's say three episodes a year - these are two-hour episodes - and in-between, thank you Telltale Games, we will do a narrative of three or four chapters, but we're going to go one step up, we're going to add a bunch of different features and a little bit more interactivity.
"And let's take the fan from the film through three chapters of the game right into the next film. We've got the writers of the film writing the game narrative. We've got the actor's likeness, voice, and the players - fans - can participate in the narrative, up to a point, and then rejoin the film narrative and it's all delivered on the same devices: the PC, the pads or any digital device.
"This is where we're going. They're all science fiction fantasy horror stuff that makes good gaming, and we are very close to announcing our distribution partners, and this is where I'm going next."
Bilson said it's just the next step in a career which spans film, games, and TV where he donned many hats over the years: writer, producer, director, EVP.
"No one has ever been able to literally move the story from linear to interactive-ish-linear and back to linear," he added. "And the reason is, there's a huge wall between the film guys and the game guys and 'you can't have that, you can't have that and you can't tell that part of the story and the game guys can't do that', and you wound up with the movie game, which thank god is dead because it was a pretty rotten aspect of our art form.
"But we're talking about building both pieces under the same roof with the same producers and having an unbelievable verisimilitude, and hopefully, if one of these hits, fantastic, because the price of entry is nothing like the kind of dice I was rolling on my last job - it's really nothing compared to that."
You can watch his closing keynote below.
