Sony and Virgin Comics are teaming up to make an MMO based on Ramayan 3392 AD.

It’s hard to put into words how awesome this is. Sony Online… you may not have delivered on the previous lasting promises - but you currently have so much win lined up I think it’d be impossible not to at least get ONE of them right.

In relatedy news, Sierra is bringing Spiderwick to a gaming form. Also as you probably know, Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) is slated for the same movie/game treatment.

I think at this point it’s quite safe to say that we’ve entered the realm of MULTIMEDIA storytelling. You could argue that I’m about 10 years late to the game in saying that but I will argue back: Movie treatment was reserved for books with very discernable action/visual elements (usually to the extrapolation of only thus a la Starship Troopers), and were required to have the screenplay/pitch before being considered. Now I think we’re at the point where movies are not made without at least shopping around and discussing the game tie-ins, and books are either made with the tie-in rights well establish and on the market or are shopped as soon as they hit the smallest glimpse of fame. This multimedia experience, for the consumer being able to experience the story either on their medium of choice, or on many if they are not satiated by the first - is reliant on the translations producing a good quality product.

I’d say at least two major events can be blamed for this success: the first being probably the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. The huge commercial and artistic successes brought two things to America: the ‘fantasy adventure blockbuster’ - opening up a huge genre of video game-ready stories and amazing novels (some of which had previously gone straight from novel to game with no movie like Dragonlance for example), and the destruction of the 90-minute movie formula. With movie stories being able to fill the time mold and episodic devision most appropriate for the story that they are telling (much like games easily vary from 2-hour-to-end to 50+ hour epics), the “you can’t fit that/translate that into a movie’ stigma was largely erased.

The second major event I’d have to argue is video games themselves. We’re a far cry from movie tie-ins that do lip service to the characters and plotline involved while being completely auxiliary to the experience. We don’t routinely have to suffer-or-avoid such atrocities as the ‘we-gotta-have-a-tie-in’ game that really can’t succeed to begin with (Home Alone anyone? - LOL at Bethesda). These days, even the most forced tie-ins are of average gaming quality at worst (on average anyhow) or are ground-breakingly good. Now that we can almost rely on a decent product and a return on investment it’s easy for investors to treat video game rights as part of the package.

Better yet we’re now in the era of true cohabitation at times. The BBC finally announced its shrouded MMO project as a co-released game to tie in with a children’s television show that they are working on. This is a bit of an interesting break for virtual worlds in general as the story of this game world itself revolves around the dualism of a real world and an alternate world. The game is tied in by being the real players’ alternate world analogue - bringing the players to the role of main story characters directly as opposed to through a virtual or roleplay abstraction. More about this in another post, as this post is almost big enough to get movie rights and I’m sure the game for this one won’t be the blockbuster it’s expected to be.