blog

For once, a game’s connection to a movie release may actually be a positive thing.  In an interesting bit of movie tie-in synergy, the upcoming Iron Man game will be using the same character model created by Industrial Light and Magic for the film.  As these screenshots show, it really is quite an impressive model, especially for such an early stage of game development.

Now if someone over there could render me a friggin' martini....

From a business standpoint, sharing movie technology with associated game developers makes perfect sense:  In this case, the game gets a super hi-res character model to use without having to spend time and resources on creating one from scratch.  It’s a concept first pioneered by LucasArts and ILM with their film-game convergence initiative, where artists and engineer from the two companies share ideas, data and even office space in order to utilize the unique strengths of the two camps.

 I can see my multi-million dollar estate from up here!

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a movie tie-in and a superhero game: two factors that usually spell critical disaster for games, and there is realistically about a 75% chance that this title will be a dud regardless of how movie-accurate it may be.  But you gotta admit, the armor looks fantastic, and the whole idea of film-game convergence is an exciting and promising concept.  It’s somewhat surprising, actually, that other cg-heavy movies like Beowulf aren’t utilizing similar techniques in the production of their related games.

We'll find out if all this shiny red armor is actually fun to play with next May 

Share this article: