Sales of music and DVDs have gone down in recent times, what with the idea of luxury items being rescaled to include things like “food” and “rent.” But video games are chugging along apace, probably because they’re a great way to forget, for a time, how your twenty years of 401K and investments got cut in half last week.
Disney, the all-devouring giant of the end times, has decided that it wants a piece of the gaming pie, and not just that tiny, little slice it’s been taking from licensed games like Kingdom Hearts. No, the vast company/demon-god has recently discovered that video games in and of themselves make for good Intellectual Property, and so has pledged to inject over 200-million dollars into video game development. Disney’s goal is not just to churn out popular games through its own in-house studio, but to create video game worlds and characters that could turn into books, movies, and television shows of their own. Sort of like a snake devouring its own tail, Disney seeks to establish a never-ending loop of new brands and content to fuel both ends of its entertainment empire.
One of the first games slated to champion this new agenda will be Split/Second, a racing game for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC platforms. Not much is known about Split/Second right now, except that the game relies highly on stylized lighting technologies and particle effects to surround the player with a unique environment.
Myself, I figured it was only a matter of time before a larger media company discovered the power of video games to create their own media maelstroms. Although we’ve yet to see a truly good video game movie, it could, in remote theory, be done. I’m just waiting for the video game adaptation of the screenplay novel of the movie of the video game sequel to hit store shelves. It will happen.
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