Because rumour has it – and has had it for a while now – that Ken Levine and crew are working on a new X-Com game. Whether they are or not, nobody knows. But if they are, that game is a shooter, with job ads for the company revealing that 2K Boston’s “next big project” is “an unannounced shooter”.

Who would have thought that the company behind one of the best shooters of the current generation would be working on another shooter?!?

2K Boston’s ‘next big project’ is a ’shooter’ [GameSpot]

1975, Jaws — “It was the Village East theatre in Birmingham, Alabama. And we rode in my sister’s husband’s Trans Am…I have certain flashes of scenes, like the scene where Roy Scheider pulls the licence plate out of the stomach of the shark. I remember that. They’re just flashes. I remember it being very scary. My brother was traumatized, to this day. I loved it.” — Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe, born in 1971

Video games all but smell of popcorn. They have been influenced by the movies, arguably more so than they have been by any other art form, save for other games. And the movies that influence them most appear to be the biggest, the summer blockbusters.

Play a game or simply visit a game development studio — watch for the posters, the action figures or listen to the mentions in casual conversation — and the influence of summer movies is apparent. A week can’t go by without noticing the sway big movies have on creators. Last Wednesday, while showing Kotaku his game The Saboteur, Pandemic designer Tom French cited Indiana Jones’ bigness and coolness of action as an influence on his game’s anti-Nazi adventure. Over the weekend as I neared the end of Ghostbusters: The Video Game — itself an offspring of summer movies — I saw a late-game scene in which one of the heroes flees from a massive rolling boulder.

“[Summer movies] are touchstones in a sense they are generational touchstones,” Stephen Alexander, veteran gaming artist at 2K Boston told Kotaku. “Games tend to reference them a lot, because the people who are making them are making them for people who are like themselves. Or they make the assumption, that because I like this, the audience will like this.”

Prints of Aliens and Star Wars can be lifted from Gears of War and Halo, Star Fox and Final Fantasy. Also, the Indiana Jones films and Predator. T2 and Tron. Jaws. Top Gun. Independence Day.

1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark — “Indiana Jones meant nothing to me. It looked like a boring Western. I had no interest in it. I remember watching the review on Siskel and Ebert in the house with my parents — the whole family was over — and I was like, ah that seems kind of cool, whatever. My dad said, ‘Yeah let’s go see that.’ …It was sold out, so we sat in the car, which I think was this 1970s-era brown Cadillac. And we just sat there for two hours, hanging out as a family, waiting for the next show to start. Eventually we got in, and, I’m not shitting you, it changed my life. It changed my fucking life. This is what I want to do. To live in that world and to be in that world, not so much Indiana Jones’ world — though that would be great — but the world of creativity and escapism and summer excitement in terms of film and video games… It just opened the world of geekdom and film-loving and it affects me to this day.” — David Jaffe

Summer movies touch everyone, not just game creators. But they may have a stronger grip in a community where it’s not uncommon for a development studio to shut down for the afternoon so the team can catch the latest summer flick at a rented theatre. That was a mandatory outing just a few Fridays ago, for 2K Boston, when they went to see Up.

“The great thing about the blockbusters is having the common vocabulary,” 2K Boston designer Bill Gardner said. “Who doesn’t talk about the Predator’s cloaking device, whatever the hell it’s called? And the T1000 and all that stuff, constantly touching on these reference points.”

In the lingua franca of video games, George Lucas is king. “Star Wars pops up all the time,” Gardner’s colleague at 2K Boston, Stephen Alexander, said. “And that’s where a lot of games draw from because it is such an iconic journey to go on and it has such emotional resonance and pays off so well.”

But game creators don’t borrow from all the summer hits of the ’80s and ’90s. Alexander may see some Goonies in Zelda, but he guesses that’s just him. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off doesn’t seem to have informed many games. Back to the Future’s influence, if it exists, is subtle.

1982, E.T. — “I remember seeing it at the Brooklyn Mall theatre and [film company people] handing out the buttons and I was just like, ‘Oh my god, I got a button.’ And now the PR department is like, ‘Big fucking deal, we made a million buttons.’ But to a kid in Alabama who was in love with the movies, especially Spielberg and Spielberg’s movies, this was like the Holy Grail.” — David Jaffe

For all the love E.T. gets, it’s had only a light touch on games. Alexander has a theory why. “The real power of E.T. was that emotional bond between E.T. and Elliott,” he argued. “Emotional resonance is something that games are still wrestling with… I haven’t seen too many games that have managed to pull that off.” Ico is the only game he can think of that fits.

The more bombastic, escapist summer movies exert the most influence. They are, according to developers like Alexander and Gardner, parallel works to video games: They share the goal of escapism. The best blockbuster movies and the best blockbuster games take you out of yourself, on a ride.

1983, Return of the Jedi — “[My mom] had come to check me and my neighbour out of sixth grade. We were going to go to like the first show at one o’clock. …I was so excited, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. The word got out and my math teacher, Mrs. Vance, who to this day I don’t forgive, basically had a shit fit about it and ended up calling my mum and stuff. It became this big deal and she wasn’t going to let me — whatever the fuck — graduate sixth grade. Ultimately, I ended up going to the movie, and I remember waiting in line. It was all the people who show up for a summer movie the first day. It was a big deal. …And I remember, after that point, really trying to recreate that for the rest of my junior high and high school experience. I remember hoping — hoping so bad — that Willow would have this huge line and it never really did.” — David Jaffe

Some developers bristle at this or at least laugh off the overwhelming influence the summer movies have. Alexander and Gardner’s boss, Ken Levine, said as much to me in January 2007: “Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that. There’s great things in that, but you need some variety… Look, I just steal from other sources.”

Aliens is the one that gets the eye-rolls a lot. Another drop-ship? Another group of space marines? Another tough-talking black sergeant? Another drab colour palette? “When it came out, Aliens’ visual design was so amazingly fresh and almost mind-blowing, it’s not surprising that so many people have taken it and used it to make their space game,” Alexander said. “It is a rich ground to place a game in, but it seems like people have gotten a little bit lazy in using this visual language at this point.”

But don’t blame the summer movies alone for this, Alexander said. “A game creator has a brilliant flash of inspiration and they mimic something from Aliens, for example, and it’s incredibly successful and then other creators mimic that game. I don’t know that it’s everybody drawing from the same source. I think games are maybe borrowing too much from each other in some ways. You fall into the ‘it worked once — let’s not be risky — and do it again.’”

1989, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — “When Last Crusade opened I was such a total fucking geek. I didn’t care. I was in high school. The cement had dried on what kind of geek I was going to be. My brother, with me and a couple of my buddies, we all had logos of Last Crusade painted on the back of our cars like it was homecoming.” — David Jaffe

There’s another draw the summer films have for game creators and the publishers they work for: Bigness.

There’s spectacle that surrounds the release of the film expressed in long lines, big ads, talk-show guest appearances, commercials, souvenir cups, national — international — media attention. It’s natural to want that.
“The spectacle around the summer blockbusters is something to envy,” Gardner said. “You want to break into the mainstream and get people talking, but when you come down to it, as envious as I may be, I try to focus on what we’re doing right more than anything else. When it comes down to it, I don’t know if we’ll every be able to emulate that type of hype.”

Still, while the siren song of summer movie status can be hard to resist, it can cause problems when game companies misuse the model. Taking the rate of explosions from a Michael Bay movie and injecting it into a game won’t make the game as exciting as the Bay movie. Even a summer movie fanatic like David Jaffe knows this. Borrowing a key scene — the visuals, the audio — doesn’t play to gaming’s core strength, interactivity. So developers should best bear their influence with caution. A little nod here or there can be a nice touch, of course.

2005, God of War — “God of War is the game I always wanted to make. And there’s a huge influence of Raiders of the Lost Ark in God of War. Pandora’s Box is the Greek mythology version of the Ark of the Covenant. Actual moves that Kratos does in God of War are directly an homage to what Indy does in Raiders of the Lost Ark. When Indy kicks over that statue when he’s in the Well of the Souls, it’s the exact same animation — obviously Harrison Ford or the stuntman did it for real — we had Kratos mimic what he did with his body with the giant column when he first gets to Athens.” – David Jaffe

So maybe the summer movie blockbusters are safe from video games ripping them off wholesale. And maybe games will continue to find their own way to develop as a unique medium. In fact, games have already been seen to be exerting their own influence on the summer films: see the sidescrolling action sequence in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones or the increasingly video-game-like action scenes and car chases in so many other summer films, like Terminator Salvation and The Bourne Ultimatum.

That doesn’t mean some creators won’t want you to feel that summer movie feeling when you settle down in front of one of their games.

2009, Eat Sleep Play — “There is a literal aspect to the influence these things have had. But then, more importantly, there is a philosophical impact that the summer movies have had from a standpoint of wanting to provide, for my audience — look I understand that we don’t make movies, we don’t reach as big of an audience — but I still take the responsibility of the audience we do speak to very seriously. And, as much as I look at the works of [Flow and Flower development studio] That Game Company or [Ico creator Fumito] Ueda when he does Shadow of the Colossus, I’m so okay leaving that level of emotion and that level of meaning to someone else. I want to be the guy who provides the escape. I want to be the guy who provides the video game equivalent of the summer blockbuster.” — David Jaffe, co-founder of game development studioEat Sleep Play

(Movie poster images via the Internet Movie Poster Awards site.)

Could Take-Two be giving 2K Boston back their unique identity? A trademark application for Irrational Boston seems to point in that direction.

Irrational Games was purchased by Take-Two back in early 2006, and then were “rewarded” with a name change to 2K Boston and 2K Australia in November of 2007, following the success of the original BioShock. Now a trademark application filed on March 27th for the name Irrational Boston, along with some t-shirts that were floating around during the Game Developers Conference last week (as seen on Joystiq) seem to be pointing towards a changing of the names.

While the trademark application and the t-shirts are certainly not a definitive announcement, it would be nice to see Irrational’s name popping up in our posts once again. Besides, this way Take-Two could re-reward them the 2K Boston name once BioShock 2 comes out. Everybody’s happy!

Take-Two has filed a trademark registration for Irrational Boston [Superannuation]

2K Boston, the house behind Bioshock, hits SF and the GDC this week looking for talent to help them with “their biggest and most ambitious project yet.” Dozens of openings are promised.

2K Boston itself is touting this push pretty hard. Back in February people spied some job listings on Gamasutra that shed some light on this new game, mostly that they’re “betting big on multiplayer.” The jobs to be filled run the spectrum – programming, design, production, art, audio.

If you are at the Game Developers Conference, look for 2K Boston reps wearing “brightly coloured ‘Be Big in Boston’ t-shirts.” Stop by and say hi, I’m sure they’ll at least give you a ballpoint pen or something – which you can then use to sign your NDA should you be hired to join this ultra top secret badass project.

This is the back of a promotional postcard they put out (the front is above), drawn up by Nate Wells, the designer who came up with the Big Daddy.

Not everybody’s firing. 2K Boston’s hiring, and its ad posting tips off that its current big project is an Unreal-based “AAA multiplayer” for Xbox, PS3 and PC.

“The BioShock team is betting big on multiplayer and plans to stay at the top of the charts,” says the job listing for a multiplayer lead engineer, which went up on Gamasutra. 2K Boston’s also looking for a multiplayer lead designer, a combat designer, a character rigger and a senior character artist. Pretty sure there are more than a few resumes coming in for this one.

2K Boston’s Next- A First Person Shooter/Multi-(Player/Platform) Focused [V for Videogames]

I think for us, we come out of our BioShock coma – from shipping that game, and how hard that was – and then making a determination. What’s next for us, and how aggressive are we going to be?

And we all looked at each other, and these guys have worked together for maybe six or ten years, all the senior creative guys on BioShock, and asked what do we want to do? Do we want to do something a little more straightforward next time, or do we want to swing for the fences again? To paraphrase, we decided to swing for the fences.

So…if they’re not doing BioShock 2, and have very good reasons for not doing BioShock 2, what are they doing?

I actually can’t talk about it, without talking about the game itself. There are things related to story, gameplay and…I don’t know how to describe it…people’s relationship with the game over the long term. That’s what we’re thinking about, but it’s about as clear as I can be.

So, not very clear at all, then!

Ken Levine – Part One [GI.biz][Pic: Hot Grill]

Oh, that’s right, it is a game.

As an aside, Digital Extremes gets an “author” credit in the database entry, thanks to its optimisation work.

BIOSHOCK Game (Playstation 3) [OFLC]

BioShock should’ve failed… In fact, it did fail a lot, over the course of time. A series of big mistakes and corrections and slipped ship dates, but all of these helped make it a good game… Some people think that constantly messing up, and pushing dates isn’t a good way to make a game, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the only way to make a good game.

Bungled development and repeated delays are your friends! Do not hate. Do not.

Wy BioShock Should Have Failed [Gamasutra via Binge Gamer]

UE3, PS3 and production experience using Python or Ruby will be highly regarded.

So Unreal Engine 3 and PLAYSTATION 3. No real big surprises, but there ya go.
Job Listing [2K Boston via Games Radar]