"Sin City" video game goes straight to the source

By Paul Hyman

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Some films seem so perfect for
converting to video games that one wonders why that never happened.
Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill," for example.

Or perhaps Frank Miller's "Sin City." Imagine what a savvy publisher
with experience in making great games from movies -- like Electronic
Arts or Activision -- could do if it were able to enlist the images and
voice acting of the 2005 film's considerable talent, including Bruce
Willis, Jessica Alba, Benicio Del Toro, Mickey Rourke and Elijah Wood.

But when the "Sin" game hits store shelves around Christmas 2009,
there will be no stars, no day-and-date marketing with the film's
sequel, "Sin City 2," and the publisher's name on the box -- Red Mile
Entertainment -- will be unknown to even the most hard-core gamers.

Indeed, the fledgling gamemaker has secured the rights not to either
of the movies but to the seven graphic novels that comprised their
source material.

"It's just one of those calls you have to make in the games
industry," says company president and COO Glenn Wong, previously
president of Electronic Arts Canada, arguably the world's largest video
game studio. "We decided that the 'Sin City' graphic novels, with their
dark images and nonlinear stories, would work better as the basis for
an interactive game."

It doesn't hurt, of course, that it's far less expensive to license
the books than the movies, but Wong claims that didn't enter into the
equation. "We wanted to go back to the source material instead of the
filtered version that people saw on the big screen," he says.

Wong recognizes that, in making that call, he forgoes the one-two
marketing punch associated with releasing a game day-and-date with its
cinematic counterpart. After all, a simultaneous release might have
been easily arranged since "Sin City 2" is in preproduction and
scheduled to hit theaters sometime next year. And one of its directors
-- "Sin" creator, author, and artist Frank Miller -- is the game's
licensor.

"We'd like to think that we'll be able to capitalize on whatever
awareness of 'Sin City' is generated by the second film," Wong says.
"But, frankly, I don't even know when that's scheduled to be released."

Wong says he is simply elated that his company was able to secure
the rights to the "Sin" game. After all, Sausalito, Calif.-based Red
Mile Entertainment, which opened its doors in 2006, has only a few
games under its belt, including "Jackass: The Game" and "Crusty Demons:
The Game."

Currently, the "Sin City" game is just six months into production
with a crew of 35 to 50 people at Melbourne, Australia-based developer
Transmission Games (formerly IR Gurus). Its plan is to build the game
on three platforms -- Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii -- using the
Unreal 3 engine.

One thing is for sure. Wong hopes to create a game franchise regardless of how well the first game sells.

"We'd like to finish game No. 1 in a year and a half," he says, "and
then turn out a sequel every other year after that. The beauty of Frank
Miller's work is that it's so rich with so many characters that, once a
gamer gets a real good taste of 'Sin City,' they're not going to say,
'OK, I've seen it all.' They're going to say, 'So when do I get more?'"

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter