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First gameplay trailer for The Walking Dead lurches into view
IGN premieres the first trailer for Telltale's The Walking Dead, and writer Gary Whitta joins afterward to discuss the challenges of crafting the game's story. You'll want to jump to 8:50 in the video for all the good stuff.
The Walking Dead gets new life with dev webseries, Playing Dead
Telltale's video game adaptation of The Walking Dead is making slow, shuffling, possibly even moaning progress into reality, at least from our perspective. Luckily for us, Telltale has created a new web show, Playing Dead, in which developers and designers talk about the tone and progress of the game, instead of taking that time to actually make it.Don't get us wrong, we love hearing details about a game based on one of our favorite comic series in recent memory, but we won't be responsible for our actions if we don't see a gameplay video soon. We might write letters.Playing Dead launches alongside a new website for Telltale's The Walking Dead, and the first episode is watchable above. In it, lead designers Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman discuss the timeline of their Walking Dead, which runs parallel to the beginning of Rick's canonical story, and the authentic approach they're taking to original writer Robert Kirkman's lore.Rodkin and Vanaman reveal that players will interact with established characters such as Glenn and Hershel, and the video offers some in-game screenshots, one featuring a woman that could be Lori. We have provided the screens below for closer inspection.Choices players make, such as saving a character's life, will carry through the month-to-month episodes, Rodkin and Vanaman say, affecting later decisions and gameplay options. Vanaman notes that the game is five episodes, spread over five months.Supplementing all the new Walking Dead info, The Book of Eli writer Gary Whitta announced today that he is working with Telltale on their adaptation.%Gallery-147727%
Penny Arcade's 'New Kid' strip to be adapted to film by Paramount
We knew it would only be a matter of time before one of Penny Arcade's imaginative one-offs got noticed by the cinematic powers that be. We might have placed our bets on The Lookouts or Automata -- as it so happens, though, the gaming comic's strip which caught the eye of Paramount Studios was "The New Kid," a one-page tale about a boy who's settling into his adolescent life on an orbiting starcraft. Paramount, which was met with success with its utterly wonderful animated film Rango, has enlisted the help of Book of Eli writer Gary Whitta to adapt the strip to a full-length animated feature. We're excited to see what he comes up with -- and ever-hopeful that somebody somewhere gives some similar attention to Automata. (Please?)
Gary Whitta worked on a Warcraft screenplay
You'll notice that I surreptitiously left the question of "screenwriter" out of the other day's Breakfast Topic. That's because, quite frankly, I have no idea who I want writing the Warcraft movie. The folks I really like in Hollywood are probably too quirky to write an epic movie like this, and the folks who usually write these epic movies are too lame to handle a world like Warcraft. In my mind, only someone like Metzen should wield the pen for this one, and even then, his strengths lie in creating universes, not dialog. So I have no idea.But apparently there's already a screenplay being worked on: with the news that Sam Raimi is taking the helm, screenwriter Gary Whitta (who's written both for games and movies) says he'd been working with both Legendary and Blizzard on crafting a screenplay that included both the sprawling world and a story that would resonate with non-players. But he says that since Raimi took over, it's likely the whole thing will go in another direction, as "his own pretty specific vision of what he wanted to do story-wise." Whitta does say, however, that, from what he's heard, "Raimi is the best possible director for this." Sounds good to us.It'll be quite a tightrope to walk: depending on what Legendary actually wants out of the film, they've got to make the story interesting and pressing enough that even non-WoW players will get into it without ruining and/or ignoring the reason why there are so many players in the first place: the lush and intriguing universe we've all enjoyed playing in. Anyone tasked with putting together a script that uses all of those blocks to build something great will have quite a job ahead of them.[via Blue's News]
Masi Oka developing MMO-related movie
Masi Oka plays the fan-favorite character Hiro on the television show Heroes, but that's not the only role he plays -- we've heard before that he's a big World of Warcraft player as well (which makes sense -- before his star turn on NBC's superhero show, he actually worked at Industrial Light and Magic developing water effects, so he's a geek at heart). And now he's using his MMO experience to create a movie: he's just signed a deal with Dreamworks to create a movie called "The Defenders," a family adventure about a group of teens playing an MMO who have to come together to have some adventures of their own. Both Oka and writer Gary Whitta are fans of WoW, so they're drawing on their experience in the game to put together the project. Oka tells the Hollywood Reporter that "the question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?" He also cites The Goonies as an inspiration for the story, as an adventure that brings back an innocence found in those old Amblin Entertainment films.Sounds interesting. It might be aimed a little young for the average WoW player (even The Goonies, while considered a cult classic nowadays, was really aimed at kids in the '80s), but a film that can take a good look at the comparison between our in-game selves and their real-life counterparts (and have some fun doing it) would definitely be something to see. The project's only just getting underway now, but we'll keep an eye out for it.
