Does the game industry have a Hollywood complex? BioShock designer Ken Levine seems to think so.
"I think there's a sense in the entertainment fields that video games are seen as the junior varsity," Levine tells Develop. "There's this feeling of 'oh one day you can come up to our league'."
Back in the late 1980s, Ken Levine hoped to break into the film industry as a screenwriter, but fell short. He instead went on to make video games and shook things up with his groundbreaking title BioShock.
Levine points out that the game's industry doors are wide-open to film directors. "Guillermo del Toro — who by the way is an amazing film director — recently signed a deal with THQ to make video games," says Levine. "And I'm thinking... he's never made a video game."
The game designer does concede that perhaps the film director could have a "genius" for making games. "But games are really, really hard to make well," he adds. "In our industry there's too many people star-struck of the movie world, jumping into deals with some big movie director just because they're big film directors."
Filmmakers are no stranger to video games. Levine says he was even offered the chance to make a game with a big movie director, but turned the project down.
"What's the point of having two creative leads together, and why would I want a film director to help me make a game, any more than they would want me to help out with their films?"
They wouldn't, which makes it odd that they "help out" on games. If they create, design or whatever, then that's a different story all together. And the skill sets, while different, do not have to be mutually exclusive.
We're too star-struck by Hollywood, says Levine [Develop] [Pic]