The computer game rights to A Song of Ice and Fire have been sold to French developers Cyanide, it was announced today.
Cyanide, an independent video game studio, and George R. R. Martin today announced their partnership to create the first-ever video games inspired by the author’s award-winning, international bestselling ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ fantasy series. Under the terms of the agreement, Cyanide has obtained the exclusive rights to develop ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ video
games for next-generation consoles and PC, and in collaboration with George R.R Martin, development has begun.
"We are all huge fans of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, so it is a true honour for our teams to be entrusted with creating the first video games inspired by this masterpiece", stated Patrick Pligersdorffer, Managing Director of Cyanide. "The twists and turns of the plot will allow us to deliver an experience which can be enjoyed by both long-time fans as well as gamers new to the series." Published most notably by Bantam Books in North America and Voyager Books in the United Kingdom, the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ novels have been translated into more than twenty languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian) and have been nominated for numerous prizes. Set in a world where nothing is simply black and white, the rich web of characters makes it an ideal background for numerous genres of video games. ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ has already been adapted into a card game and a board game. More recently, HBO acquired the rights with the intent of turning the novels into a television series.
Cyanide are a relatively small-scale developer who are best-known for the well-received Chaos League and Blood Bowl fantasy sports titles (the latter a Warhammer tie-in game).
This news is both welcome and of minor concern. On the welcome side, fantasy books aren't often signed up for being turned into computer games and they have a surprisingly good hit rate. The three games based on the Discworld novels were all pretty good adventure titles, the Betrayal at Krondor RPG (based on Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar novels) was excellent and even the 1999 Wheel of Time game was reasonable, considering the difficult circumstances it was made under.
On the minor concern side of things, and I stress the minor, Cyanide have never had a project of this scale to handle before, and given that both Relic and BioWare (the premier PC real-time strategy and RPG developers respectively) had cited the books as influences recently, there was some reason to hope that a major studio with a large budget would be interested in the project. However, smaller studios have a certain amount of creative freedom that larger, more financially pressured ones do not, and small or new studios have certainly come from nowhere to produce an amazing game before. The Creative Assembly, for example, were only known for porting EA sports games before developing Shogun: Total War, which came out of nowhere to revolutionise the strategy game genre in 2000.
At this time, no further information is available on the title, such as what the game's genre will be or the expected development schedule. For a modern multiformat game, unless they've already been working on it for some time before the announcement was made, it is likely to be at least a 1.5-3 year development cycle, depending on genre.
10 comments:
Very cool news. It is probably a pipe dream but I hope it comes out for Wii.
This could be an amazing game! I hope they do it right... : )
I'm not usually one to be bothered about how long authors take to finish their books, but FER CHRISSAKES FINISH THE SERIES ALREADY BEFORE YOU HAVE SOLD EVERYTHING!! 5 FUCKING YEARS AND WHAT DO I GET A FUCKING WILD CARDS UPDATE? JESUS H CHRIST FINISH THE SERIES ALREADY!! IF ERICKSON GRINDS IT OUT YOU CAN TOO. PUT DOWN THE DONUTS AND MINIATURES AND ASOIAF TOILET PAPER AND FRIDGE MAGNETS AND ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOUR SELLING THE RIGHTS TO AND FINISH THE BOOKS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
I do apologize Wert, I am an avid reader of your's and Pat's blog and I'm too polite to slap this on GRRM's blog or westeros boards but I needed to vent somewhere.
Check out Neil Gaiman's comments on the situation:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/officialgaiman/525510.html?page=1&view=11814086#comments
uptheblues... I totally agree with you. If he weren't so enamored with Hollywood, he could finish it - obviously he can't help himself. They've been dangling that carrot in front of him for more than a decade. And now that HBO seems to be a go (don't hold your breath), we won't see any new book in years. My guess is that they will fall out over the screenplay. He won't want to make the necessary changes that need to happen, and in all likelyhood it would turn out to be just another "Rome" anyway.
The screenplay for the pilot is finished, a first draft is publicly available, and GRRM approved it and the changes they made, so that doesn't seem to be an issue so far.
And if ASoIaF became as big a hit as ROME with none of the weaknesses that got that series cancelled (like its huge budget), GRRM will definitely not be complaining.
HBO WILL complain if they catch up to him with no more books to adapt, so the TV deal makes it more likely that he will finish the books in a more timely fashion. And between Books 6 and 7 he needs to shave off about a year in the writing time to avoid that being a major issue.
what a complete waste of the rights to the game , the lore needed a big budget and AAA developer at the helm, not some French indie house.
My initial thinking was the same, and then I remembered that in 1999 the only games under the Creative Assembly's belt were some EA sports conversions. Then they brought out SHOGUN: TOTAL WAR from nowhere and blew everyone away.
So there's certainly no reason Cyanide cannot produce a good game. The other issue is that if a Triple-A house hadn't picked up the rights by now, they're probably not going to in the near future. The only thing that might have changed that is if the HBO series is a massive hit, which would mean waiting another several years.
Yeah but what _type_ f game will it be? I've not been a gamer for many years (beyond Bejeweled and Scrabble during boring work hours) 'cause there is just too much good TV to watch, movies to enjoy and books to read and gaming took up too much of my time, but I could be tempted into playing this if it was good enough and ina genre I liked.
Thanks for the Gaiman link, I reckon her pretty much said everything that needs saying. Oh except that a grown man making dioramas to go in his library out of toy soldiers is just plain weird.
http://www.dungeon-party.com/
This is Cyanide's latest product. They have a certain sense of humour, but their game does not float my boat, so take this biased comment with a grain of salt. I have no idea what they plan to make out of the GRMM ASOIaF franchise, but add Blood Bowl and their other game to Dungeon Party, and I fear they would have to change their style completely to fit the ASOIaF theme. I cannot imagine it with the rather blunt humour of their previous games.
Besides that, Dungeon Party (IMO) sucks terribly.
What gerne would ASOIaF fit? I fear the best we can hope for is a loosely inspired adventure or strategy game.
But I guess they will do it as everyone does nowadays - turn it into a MMO, no matter the cost... no matter if it makes sense or not. I feel terribly hurt when I think of them putting the usual free to play, but real money transactions scheme over ASOIaF. Or just the generic DIKU MUD scheme a la EverQuest/World of Warcraft...
Think of Age of Conan, one of the few good aspects is that it at least tries to capture the savage Hyborean World of Robert E. Howard, besides that...
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