Director of popular movies such as District 9 and Chappie Neill Blomkamp is teaming up with developer Gunzilla Games to create a new, AAA multiplayer shooter title. The Academy-nominated director will join the developer as Chief Visionary Officer, and will work with the studio’s creatives “to make sure his vision is workable.” While the director has no prior experience in game development, Blomkamp states that he hopes to utilize his experience as a screenwriter and mentions that a game like Remedy’s Control is a title that he finds “highly fascinating.”
While Gunzilla Games has not released any games in the past, it boasts experienced developers from other triple-A studios such as EA, Ubisoft, and Crytek. And while Neill Blomkamp may seem to stick out like a sore thumb when it comes to video game development, the director does technically have prior experience in video games—albeit in the form of a canceled Halo movie helmed by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
On the topic of video game development, Blomkamp notes that his role will be similar to that of George R.R. Martin’s in FromSoftware’s upcoming Elden Ring, being that he will be responsible for imagining the world, and crafting a rich backstory and history for the rest of the dev team to find a story to tell in that world and a game for people to play. While neither Blomkamp nor Gunzilla Games have stated any details about the upcoming game, he does mention that the idea of a “near future science fiction is something that is really interesting.” The director also notes that games, where the player is dropped into a “synthetic three-dimensional environment”, are among his favorites citing games such as Control from Remedy as examples.
My analogy is that films and passive narrative formats will sort of be like books on a shelf in the sense that they’re always there, and people will always be absorbing them – but the dominant thing when you come home from work and you do something will be some form of highly interactive… a place that you’re dropped into, a three-dimensional world where something is unfolding over time … I think it’s going to be it’s going to be pretty incredible where, where it goes. So I just want to be a part of it.
Neill Blomkamp ends the interview with his own prediction as to how games will evolve in the future, stating that he believes they will “become what films were in the 20th century … the thing that is the dominant form of cultural entertainment.”
[Source: IGN]
