General Gaming Skybound Games: Modern Live-Action Video Games Inevitable

[Pikachu]

https://variety.com/2019/gaming/features/skybound-games-modern-live-action-video-games-inevitable-1203191471/

 

Quote

Skybound Games deep interest in narratively-driven games is driven in part by a belief that modern live-action adventure video games are an inevitability.

 

“I think this particular part of gaming, this particular genre is, is evolving quite rapidly,” Ian Howe, CEO of Skybound Games, told Variety in a recent interview. “I’m really pleased to see that because it’s a genre I personally love.”

 

Howe said his love classic adventure games go back to the days of Lucas Arts and even his own work on games like “Grim Fandango.”

That interest is in part why Skybound Games worked with Telltale Games on the studio’s take on “The Walking Dead.” It also drives some of the conversations the group — which is a part of Robert Kirkman’s Skybound Entertainment — had with other developers.

 

“We met with a lot of different companies around the world who are really trying to innovate heavily in this space in terms of how you tell stories in games and how you give the player agency and how you make those choices matter,” he said. “On the surface, it seems like an easy task, but once you really get into that — once you scratch the surface —  it’s an incredibly complex thing to do. It’s actually, in many respects, the most inefficient way of making a game because you end up leaving so much on the cutting room floor.

 

That’s one reason Telltale Games used the same approach for its many games, something for which Howe thinks the company was wrongly maligned.

 

“The reality is it’s incredibly difficult to do anything different,” he said. “I’ve met with many companies who are spending millions of dollars trying to innovate and trying to figure out how to do that better or bigger or more. And the truth is not many of them are coming up with anything that innovative yet, but I wait to see what’s going to come over the next couple of years.”