By Stevie Smith Dec 18, 2007, 13:12 GMT
Hollywood stars (contractually) providing their talents for licensed videogame tie-ins isn’t something that suprises gamers these days. In fact, sound-a-likes are now the rarity that cause cocked eyebrows when the ‘proper’ star turn is oddly missing.
Will Quantic Dream pull in the cream of Hollywood with Heavy Rain? Credit: Atari.
However, when it comes to those videogames not existing as profit offshoots for Hollywood studios, securing A-list stars is considerably more difficult, especially regarding games where talent input reaches beyond just vocal performance.
Take French Developer Quantic Dream, for example, which has tried in the past to get a certain Leonardo DiCaprio to jump on the videogame bandwagon. Back in 2004, Quantic Dream attempted to lure the star toward Fahrenheit (Xbox, PS2, PC), which led to a meeting that ended with DiCaprio politely declining on the grounds that technology was not at a sufficient level to accurately portray his acting performance.
But time and technology has moved on since then, and Quantic Dream is once again hoping to sign up some of Hollywood’s biggest box office stars for its latest PlayStation 3 game, which is presently being produced beneath the working title of ‘Heavy Rain.’
"Today, it’s very different. We’re talking with class A actors. These Hollywood actors are asking us about the scenario and the stories as the technical aspects are taken care of," enthused Quantic Dream co-founder Guillaume de Fondaumière in a GamesIndustry interview. "We’ve been able to demonstrate that we’re capable of portraying the performance. They are [now] asking, "what’s the subject matter, what’s the role?"
Quantic Dream initially revealed a tech demo for Heavy Rain back at the E3 expo in 2006, which included an impressive virtual actor showcasing the developer’s technological progression. Jump forward to today, and the French developer now believes that any humanistic gap existing throughout its E3 demo has been removed and that real-time virtual actors are now a distinct possibility.
"With our next project we’re going to demonstrate with hundreds of characters that we can have extremely realistic characters that not only move like real actors but express themselves through facial animations and speech like real actors, and are extremely accurate to the actors they are portraying," added Fondaumière.
Sounds intriguing, eh? Click HERE for the full GI.biz interview.
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