EA's 2008: Spielberg, Sports And Screaming Ducks

There may, within days, finally be some further information shaking loose from Electronic Arts and collaborator Steven Spielberg as to the nature of the three video game titles--one almost a complete mystery thus far--that they've been cooking up for the past couple of years.

It was back in October, 2005 when industry leader EA announced a deal with Spielberg to create three "new original franchise properties", with the filmmaker taking advantage of the company's gleaming new facility in the Playa Vista complex (where he almost put down stakes for DreamWorks when his company started up) as a shared skunk works. The game company's EALA division had released its lucrative Medal of Honor series after the World War II game was developed by DreamWorks Interactive. Spielberg, with his passel of youngsters at home, is more than fair hand with a joystick, and lately he's been down to EA about once a week. (Producer Jerry Bruckheimer in August announced a deal with MTV, who plans to invest more than $500 million into interactive games in the next two years, to develop games that would start to join MTV's currently zooming Rock Band on store shelves in 2009. And Peter Jackson struck his own deal to stoke Microsoft's potent Halo franchise.) Beyond the declaration that the director would bring his "signature style of storytelling to the concept, design, story and artistic visualization of the new games", the specifics remained a bit mysterious until July of last year when, timed to the E3 summit in Santa Monica, the company teased gamers with some facts:

Code-named "LMNO" and "PQRS," the first two games to come from the exclusive relationship will be previewed at this week's E3 Media & Business Summit...

The "LMNO" game is being created for Sony Corp.'s (SNE) PlayStation 3, Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Xbox 360 and PCs.

It will be a "contemporary action adventure" where the player partners with a female character who evolves over time depending on how she interacts with others in the game, said Neil Young [not the Lionel train buff who plays guitar], general manager of EA's Los Angeles studio.

"PQRS," which is being developed for Nintendo Co.'s Wii, will have gamers wielding the wireless remote to manipulate blocks in various ways.

"Of course just playing with blocks does not a game make," [Young] said Monday. "Now imagine there are up to 50 different properties that can be associated with them. They can explode or form a chemical reaction."

Young said Spielberg, known for his roster of films such as "Saving Private Ryan," "Schindler's List," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and "E.T.," got the idea for the block game after a round of Wii tennis with Nintendo game legend Shigeru Miyamoto during last year's E3.

It will be a "contemporary action adventure" [Young added] where the player partners with a female character...the players' interactions with the girl will decide what powers she develops and how she chooses to use them. According to Spielberg, "The challenge is, can the game have an emotional impact on players while they are actively manipulating the world?"

Now that The Office's Dwight Schrute has pretty well given himself to his Second Life avatar (and even the coach's wife's sister on Friday Night Lights is taping over his game tapes to catch The Office--hello, no Tivo in Texas?), soon we'll all be responsible for adding an avatar to our other online personae.

Complicating the trend towards real life being rendered into blocky animation is the latest college hoops promotion by EA's cash-cow Sports division, which has been raking in money from its Madden NFL franchise, via a licensing deal for which it pays the Players' Union some $28 million a year--though certain retired stars like the Browns' Bernie Parrish are complaining that their look and playing styles are being plundered for free, unlike the quarterbacking Manning boys, who take about $4 million in combined payouts per annum. (EA was also involved in a recent dispute with Fox News, who reported, in error, that the company's "Mature"-rated (17 -plus) Mass Effect game--created by their Bioware division and the most film-like of vidgames--showed frontal nudity.)

The new twist in the hoops title, as I am informed by EA 's NCAA March Madness `08 product manager Tyler Vaught, is that six schools are being visited by his team to scout out which college has the most ferocious--which is to say, vidgame-genic--rooting section. That arena, and crowd, will form the backdrop for the game.

Without giving away the store just yet--his squad still has to visit the U.S.C.-Arizona tilt in L.A. this Sunday and has a date at University of Virginia Georgia Tech--the early leader among University of Arkansas, Purdue and Oregon is clearly the Oregon Ducks', bellowing, sign-shaking Pit Crew.

There's no getting around it, the Pit Crew behaves abominably. Clad in yellow tee shirts that grant them entry to the arena a half hour before game time, they "did some things I never saw anybody do," notes an impressed Vaught. He liked the crew's practice of lining up in files to usher the players from locker room to hardwood with lusty cheering, and although he attended the controversial game last week in which the yellow-shirted mob taunted UCLA center Kevin Love with homophobic epithets. They hurled insults about his father Stan--a star Oregon player of yore, about uncle Mike Love of the Beach Boys, who was in attendance, and even--this is cheaper still --about Sixties-damaged Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson. When Love temporarily hit the deck with what looked like a painful injury, they chanted "Puss-y! pussy-y!, puss-y!" as he labored back into action.

All Love, 6'10" and 270 pounds, did was stuff in 25 points and grab 18 rebounds, thoroughly dominating the Ducks, who blew leads and lost in the fourth quarter and then spit the bit out again against USC three days later. Coach Ernie Kent, who along with the school's tepid administration had steadily defended the Pit Crew (even though some of their number once agitated for his ouster despite a steadily winning tenure), finally grabbed a mic before the USC game to plead for restraint. But the Pit Crew mob, like most non-athletes, probably can't grasp the wisdom letting of sleeping giants lie. ("One thing you don't want to do is wake me up," Love said evenly after the game.) In any event, they're likely to get their wish of being converted to video game fascisti, to rule over March Madness `08--released the second week of March to coincide with the tournament--before it's buried by something even nastier, Grand Theft Auto IV, from RockStar, on April 29.

Leading industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities, speaking on Henry Truc's web cast, is calling EA a strong buy--the company's web cast of their earnings conference call can be heard starting Thursday at 5 p.m. E.S.T.-- and foresees that even a recession might only clip a point off what might be a year of growth around 13 or 14 percent. (Not only does the "nesting" instinct take over during hard times, he says, but both the "self-indulgent boys" -- aged 18 to 30--and the boy-indulgent mothers who for the two biggest buying demo for vid games won't quit doing so despite being skint.) He sees Nintendo as the coming monster (their Wii player has been so successful that EA was criticized for some time for not responding with enough software for it--thus one of the Spielberg titles designed for it), but not simply for Wii. Rather, thanks to their DS platform, as the current 65 million handheld game units in the marketplace soar towards 95 million, Nintendo is ideally positioned. One would say the other hardware makers don't want to wake them up--but it's probably already too late. In any event, 2008 promises to be a year of further, significant market penetration for the industry, and it's no accident that some of Hollywood's key visionaries, like Spielberg, Jackson and Bruckheimer, are climbing on board.

(Frame grab from NCAA March Madness courtesy of EA)