LucasArts President Has Quit

LucasArts has just confirmed to Kotaku that Jim Ward, longtime Lucas worker bee and current president of LucasArts, has resigned from the company "for personal reasons" and will be leaving LucasArts in a couple of weeks.

Ward, who began his career in advertising, started work at LucasFilm in 1997 as the head of their marketing division. In 2004 Ward was named president of LucasArts.

No word yet on the reasoning behind his seemingly sudden departure or where he will land, but we'll keep you up to date here.

Update: We've spoken with LucasArts about Ward's notice and gotten a comment from Ward.

The shorts of the Sundance Film Festival will be going on sale on the Xbox 360, iTunes and Netflix starting Friday, the festival announced today.

All said 45 short films from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival will begin hitting the three platforms starting on Jan. 18 and running through 2011. The films will sell for about $2 a pop on all of the services. Hit the jump for the full list of films and descriptions coming.

Uwe Boll on Larry King Live?

By John Gaudiosi

The year 2008 is going to be a very busy year for controversial film director Uwe Boll, who has a legion of detractors in the gaming community after films like Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and House of the Dead. The prolific filmmaker, who independently finances every one of his movies, has a slate of movies in the can. He talks about what the coming year brings in this exclusive interview.

First up for Boll is his $60 million fantasy epic, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. The movie, which stars Ray Liotta, Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Kristanna Loken, Matthew Lillard and Burt Reynolds, will open on 2,500 screens across North America on January 11—making it Boll's biggest film release yet.

"In the Name of the King is tracking well," said Boll. "Eighty percent of the TV spots for the film will begin January 1. The film opened in Germany and other foreign territories already and remained in the Top 10 for the first three weeks in every territory.

Boll concedes that In the Name of the King is by far the best movie he's ever made with the best cast and the best script he's ever worked with.

As the Writers Guild of America strike continues to eke its way toward a very unhappy holidays, Variety has put together a little list of things striking writers can do in their spare time.... no they didn't include playing through BioShock. They did include writing video games though.

While the WGA has made no secret that it would like to eventually cover vidgame writing, it hasn't pushed the issue yet and is allowing members to work on games during the strike.

"It has been an interesting shift," says one tenpercenter who focuses on vidgames. "The literary agents are now saying, 'Why don't we get our clients over there during the strike?' even though in the past they thought the money wasn't good enough or the work is too demanding."

While the article says that the pay isn't that good comparatively, they list the typical fee as $50,000. Man, maybe I should change jobs. The article has a lot of other interesting insights into the process of writing the story for a video game, like how long it takes and how disjointed it can be.

This pen's for hire [Variety]

By John Gaudiosi

Long before Hollywood screenwriter (Pulp Fiction, Silent Hill) and director (Rules of Attraction) Roger Avary was writing movies, he was writing code. Avary, who co-wrote Robert Zemeckis' 3D computer-generated Beowulf with Neil Gaiman, never published a game, but he shared many with his friends.

"When I was a kid, Star Raiders on the Atari 800 was the be-all, end-all game," said Avary. "It was Star Trek and Star Wars rolled into one. You had a map and you could refuel at star bases and defend them. I'll never forget what it was like to warp from one location to another and try to keep centered or else I'd fall off course. I bought an Atari 800 computer because of that game and learned how to program on that computer using 6502 Assembly.

Avary regrets never submitting his biggest game, Shuttle Crash, to the Atari Program Exchange, which published games created by users. The game was an interpretation of Lunar Lander, but gamers had to perform a forced landing while doing as little damage as possible to the ship and keeping the crew alive.

Studio sources tell me that yesterday's rumor that Hitman was getting de-gored so it could catch a PG-13 rating were just that: Rumors.

The sources tell me that director Xavier Gens is still working on the film and that Nicholas De Toth has just been brought in as a consultant not as THE editor.

In fact there will likely be a team of editors involved in working with the film. More importantly I'm told that the studio realizes that to capture the essence of Agent 47 they have to make an R-rated film and that's definitely what the studio expects the film to get when it hits the MPAA "soon." In fact they are "embracing" the R.

While I take this latest revelation with a healthy dose of anti-spin skepticism I am, once more, giddy with anticipation.

Movie site Twitch reports that Fox has stepped into what was shaping up to be perhaps the best video game movie ever made, and "improved" it. And by improved I mean screwed it all up.

Apparently the studio has yanked director Xavier Gens from the film and put Nicolas De Toth in the saddle. De Toth, apparently, is the guy who watered down Live Free or Die Hard.

Fox made this move, Twitch reports, because they wanted to avoid the hard R rating the movie was headed for, what with all of its gore, headshots and inspiration drawn from action films like The Killer and A Bittersweet Life.

That's right, they don't want Hitman to be too gory. Next!

Fox Yanks HIT MAN From Director Xavier Gens [Twitch, via First Showing]

By: Bob Denerstein

Back in the '80s, when such favorites as Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Q-bert were being played in bars, I was busy with what I regarded as more appropriate saloon activity: knocking back enough cold ones to make a mockery of eye-hand coordination.

Despite my lack of personal knowledge, I decided to check out director Seth Gordon's "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," a documentary about men who play competitive Donkey Kong. You gamers already know most of the details: An outfit called Twin Galaxies establishes the standards, and various folks vie to break records on what the movie regards as one of the most difficult machines ever, requiring amounts of concentration that would challenge an eastern yogi.

But forget all the game stuff. It's not the game that makes "King of Kong" so entertaining; it's characters in conflict. Sure there's a cast of supporting dweebs, but the movie boils down to a mano-a-mano Kong-off between Billy Mitchell, an arrogant champion, and Steve Wiebe, his humble challenger.

Hollenshead Talks Wolfenstein Movie

What for Art Thou?

By: Bob Denerstein

To call it art or not to call it art?

That's the question that seems to stir passions and make lips quiver with rage when talk turns to video games.

Begin furrowing your brow now. The whole art vs. non-art discussion is complex, difficult and possibly beyond resolution, but those who exalt the virtues of movies over video games often fail to take into account some of the strange variations in the way movies are made, relevant factors when it comes to deciding whether films deserve to be placed on an art pedestal.

With much trepidation, I'm dipping a toe into these treacherous waters because a) I'm too foolish to refrain and b) because there are elements within the film community - and I'm a 27-year veteran of film criticism - that insist that video games can't be art.

Roger Ebert, perhaps the world's most famous film critic and also one of its best, recently recanted his original position. Video games could be art, Ebert wrote, although not "high art." I know lots of critics who wouldn't hesitate to turn a big thumbs down on the notion that video games can be art, and many of their arguments revolve around intention and singularity of vision.

But when we're talking movies, intentions remain elusive. A very capable screenwriter once told me that he hated the vaunted auteur theory - the one that identifies directors as the guiding force behind movies. Writers generally feel slighted by directors, but this writer's animosity derived from first-hand observation. No theory applies to every film, or even to a majority of them, he said.

Lost Game Coming First Quarter of 08

The Lost video game will be shipping for the Xbox 360, PC and Playstation 3 in the first quarter of next year, Ubisoft announced today at Comic Con.

The game will put you in the shoes of a surviving passenger of Oceanic flight 815 working to unravel the mysteries of the island and confront your own dark past. The game will include locations and characters from the show and include puzzles, battles and "other challenges."

Ubi plans to unveil the first official trailer for the game during the 5 p.m. Lost Season 4 panel at Comic-Con today. Hit the jump for the release.

I've been hearing about, even checking out, Beowulf for months now. The game based on the movie based on the epic poem. Normally, that sort of media skipping would be like fingernails down a chalkboard for me, but so far I remain highly impressed with the tact that Ubisoft is taking in turning the tale of a blood-soaked Danish king to the console.

Most important to me is that the developers will be using material from the entire poem to create their own epic, instead of focusing in on the oft-quoted-in-high-school Grendal bits. The game will have you play through 30 years of Beowulf's life, a deeper look than even the Zemeckis film will take.

Most important to you, likely, is that the game (xbox 360, PS3, PC and PSP) was built using the YETI technology used to create Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. Which means it looks like hot sex and controls like a dream.

In the game you will take control of an evolving thane army, ordering the thanes you rescue and recruit to help Beowulf progress through the game. The fighting system uses combos, parries and the ability to upgrade skill sets. You also have these thing called Carnal Power which can be used to top off attacks and weapons. The game even has a little Assassin's Creed in it, letting Beowulf hold onto walls and climb as well as fight up-close-and-personal with enemies and giant monsters (No crabs are reported in this game.)

Hit the jump for the official press release and the first ever video (18 or older) showing in-game play. I love me some jaw breaking.

Spielberg's Games Revealed

In a July 16-dated Newsweek story N'Gai Croal reveals that Steven Spielberg's much rumored Wii-flavored video game will be an "action-puzzle simulator" code-named PQRS. Croal describes it as a game that blends the creativity of Jenga with the charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Not very helpful for those searching out specifics, but Croal says the game will let you manipulate blocks with the remote.

The second game (Spielberg is said to be working on three with Electronic Arts) is a PS3 and Xbox 360 game code-named LMNO which is described as "North by Northwest meets ET... if ET were female, grown up and hot.

You don't play as the girl, however. You're an ex-secret agent, and the bond that you forge while on the run with the computer-controlled woman—good, bad, indifferent—determines the nature of her special abilities and the ways in which she'll assist you. Says Spielberg: "The challenge is, can the game have an emotional impact on players while they are actively manipulating the world?" Based on the clever ways in which he and EA are extracting a genuine performance from their digital Eve—complete with eyes that widen, lips that curl and translucent skin that lights up in different colors to express her quicksilver moods—we think Spielberg's got yet another hit on his hands.

The real question I think is whether the third game will be code-named HIJK or TUVW and if he plans on going beyond those initial three games and completing the entire alphabet in secret code names.

Wii Can't Wait to Play [Newsweek, via Destrutoid]

Digital Beowulf Movie Shares Assets with Game

Ubisoft Working on Beowulf

Angelina Jolie Pacifies Stolen Youth With Nintendo

Feature: The Colossus and the Comedian

Feature: Big Boi on Games and Slapping the Shit Out of People