Monster Island News: Atari

Written By: Ken Hulsey
Source: Variety

I'm old enough to remember when there were two stand-up video game machines at the local
grocery store, one was "Space Invaders" and the other was "Asteroids." By today's standards, the games were very 'primitive', but at the time they were 'futuristic' and a heck of lot of fun. Members of my generation plunked in countless numbers of quarters into "Asteroids" machines, then a few years later, pleaded with our parents to fork out $30 for an "Asteroids" cartridge for our Atari 2600 home video game system.

You have to remember that we are talking about the early 1980s here. As much fun as "Asteroids" was to play, there really wasn't much to it, the game was nothing like the virtual movies that video games have evolved into today, it was just a simple 2D triangle shaped ship on a black field shooting at floating space rocks and an occasional enemy ship. Not much to it.

It makes me wonder why several Hollywood studios were bidding feverishly for the movie rights to this pioneer video game from decades past?

Universal, ultimately, outbid both Fox and Sony for the coveted rights. The studio has lined up producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (GI Joe) and screen writer Matt Lopez (Bedtime Stories) to develop a script for "Asteroids."

It is safe to assume that since the video game had absolutely no story to it, the film makers will have a blank canvas to work with.

If the film ends up being a success, then we will certainly look forward to movies based on "Defender", "Tempest" and "Missile Command." None of those had any stories to them either.

Source: Rocket XL

Taking the fear to a new level, the next-gen Alone in the Dark features the macabre style of the series played with new gameplay mechanics and a broader-reaching, action-packed play style. Explore fully-interactive realtime worlds, interacting with physics and roaming the wide-open, fright-filled environments.

This next-gen Alone in the Dark is also built around a unique episodic game structure, the story is split into a number of distinct 30-40 minute episodes, doled out one at a time as you play. Each time the player launches a saved game, the episode will begin with a video summary of the previous episode to quickly re-immerse the player in the story and removing the need to remember where they were or what they were doing. Every episode will close with a nail-biting cliff-hanger ending to rattle players’ nerves, and if the player is leaving the game a video teaser of the next episode will play to leave them wanting more.