George Miller and Corey Barlog join forces

This is not an alliance that I would have predicted but boy does it have potential to produce something interesting. There’s a great series of interviews available with both Corey and George (separately) on Ngai Croal’s Level Up Newsweek blog which you can read here. The big news is that they are going to make a Mad Max game together alongside the next Mad Max film. George Miller has some very interesting comments about how making Happy Feet, his first CGI feature, opened his eyes to the possibilities of the games medium. Here is some of what he says:

The realization was, as I started to work in the digital realm, that film suddenly is able to do things that you weren’t able to do before. And once I got into that, like everyone else, I saw the obvious convergence of film towards games and games towards film. So, I got swept along and found myself sort of in a current that was heading towards games.
The other big thing for me was the fact that film is a pretty closed narrative–it moves along at 24 frames a second, it’s extremely linear, and in that sense rigid, whereas games bust that open. So in a way, with games being more exploratory, it’s closer to what a novelist can do in many ways. A novelist can stop the forward momentum of their story and go explore little cul-de-sacs and then come back again. Games allow you to do that as well. Basically, games and films and just about everything else comes from the heading of storytelling. So it’s just another way to tell stories, I think.

The interviews are well worth a read and Corey also lets slip a few secrets about why he left Sony after God of War I, 2 and half of 3.