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As the video-game business exploded over the past few years, people in Hollywood couldn't help noticing that their 10% cut was becoming bigger and bigger. "They started getting these huge royalty checks that were doubling every year," says Gilman Louie, chairman of Spectrum Holobyte, publisher of the popular game Tetris. "Finally someone said, 'Why aren't we in that business? Why are we leaving the rest of that money on the table?' "
Thus began a massive consolidation in which every major Hollywood studio either bought a video-game company, started its own in-house interactive department, or did both. "People used to ask, What's the risk of getting in this business?" says Steve Eskenazi, an analyst at the investment firm Alex. Brown & Sons. "This year the question is, What's the risk of not getting into the business?"
Now when a movie studio agrees to license a video game, it gets involved in the game's design from the start. When Steven Spielberg realized that a plot he was considering for a movie would work better as a game, he took it to his friend George Lucas, whose own video-game operation turned the idea into a spelunking adventure called The Dig. At Sony Interactive, every movie script that Columbia buys is screened by the video-game department for its game potential. If it looks promising, says Olaf Olafsson, president of Sony Electronic Publishing, a separate scriptwriting team develops the game version. In some cases the movie script is actually changed to add what Sony's creative team calls IPMs -- interactions per minute -- to make for a better game.
When film crews go out to the set, the video-game people are right behind. Sony used footage from Cliffhanger and Dracula to create the backdrops of the + CD versions of those games. Spectrum Holobyte is doing the same for a version of Star Trek: The Next Generation it is creating for 3DO. In some cases, extra footage is shot on location to provide additional material for the games.
To make the characters in video games more realistic, actors are being recruited to serve as models. Acclaim, the video-game company that made Mortal Kombat, has created a special "motion capture studio" for this purpose. A martial-arts expert with as many as 100 electronic sensors taped to his body sends precise readings to a camera as he goes through his moves -- running, jumping, kicking, punching. The action is captured, digitized and synthesized into a "naked" wire-frame model stored in a computer. Those models can then be "dressed" with clothing, facial expressions and other characteristics by means of a computer technique called texture mapping.
To make Voyeur, Propaganda Films shot live actors in an empty room and then combined their digitized images with computer-generated sets -- beds, desks, windows. To make Switch, an interactive motion picture to be released next year, director Mary Lambert rented Sound Stage 5 at the Hollywood Center Studios. Watching a scene in which actress Deborah Harry, dressed in a skintight dress with a plunging neckline, strides into a chamber decorated with ancient Egyptian props is like stepping back into the studios of the 1930s.
"Wow," someone says, as giant columns begin to crumble around her. "The whole place is a gigantic vault."
"And cut!" shouts Lambert. "Thank you everybody. That was nice."