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ENTERTAINMENT / Movies
"Bourne" video game departs from script
Updated: 2007-08-08 21:50
LOS ANGELES?- What game publisher wouldn't want to ride the coattails of
its huge marketing campaign?
But, oddly enough, there's no "Bourne" game in sight, at least not this
year. And the one that Vivendi Games has up its sleeve for a mid-2008
release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is no "movie game," its
developers insist.
Didn't the publisher of "John Woo Presents Stranglehold" -- which leaps
onto video game shelves the week of August 20 -- say the same thing about
its game? Is there suddenly some stigma against movie games?
"Not at all," says Emmanuel Valdez, chief creative officer at High Moon
Studios, Vivendi's San Diego-based internal developer, which is building
the game titled "The Bourne Conspiracy."
"Games for next-generation consoles take longer than movies to make --
two years and sometimes longer," Valdez says. "We knew we didn't have
enough time to build a quality 'Ultimatum' game and come out with it at
the same time as the movie. So we decided to do things differently,
something new."
That meant taking elements of the first movie, "The Bourne Identity," and
stirring in lots of fresh material that needed to be approved by the
estate of Robert Ludlum, the "Bourne" books author who died in 2001.
The project began in late summer 2005, when "we started off almost making
a straight 'Identity' adaptation," Valdez recalls. "But the movie had
come out in 2001, the sequel 'Supremacy' had come out in 2004, and we
knew we could never finish in time for the release of 'Ultimatum' this
year. So, together with the Ludlum estate, we set out to make something
original that could stand on its own two feet."
Matt Wolf, a creative consultant to the game hired by Ludlum
Entertainment, arranged for Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter for all three
"Bourne" movies, to flesh out the saga. He was responsible for ensuring
that the game played by the rules of the "Bourne" universe.
"For example, we needed to impress on the game developers that Jason
Bourne isn't a gun-slinging maniac," Wolf says. "Part of my job was not
just to guard the borders and say no; it was to come up with some
creative solutions and support the process."
Matt Tieger, the game's lead designer, recalls that the High Moon team
had two principles that became the basis for the game's creation.
"The first was that Bourne isn't Gucci," he says. "Meaning that he isn't
the type of spy who carries a lot of stuff with him . . . He pretty much
weaponizes his environment. The second really important principal was the
fact that Bourne always has a target, an objective. Meaning he's not the
type of character who goes wandering around an open-ended world."
Similarly, the High Moon team adopted the hand-held camera style of Paul
Greengrass, director of the second and third "Bourne" movies.
"His style is very journalistic," Valdez says, "and when we use it for
the action sequences, it lends a very cinematic look and feel to the
game."
While the first "Bourne" game is taking three years to reach completion,
subsequent titles will be speedier, Valdez says. "The first game in a
franchise always takes more time; there are technical challenges that
we're dealing with . . . that we won't have to face next time."
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