While I was in Paris for the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, I stopped by Gameloft’s headquarters to see what they were up to.

It turned out that the mobile game makers are quite busy. I can’t talk about what they’re working on until sometime in the near future, but I did get a nice tour of the office.

Check out photos of where the 100+ employees toil hard to put out games (as well as the countless phones, cables and chargers they have to deal with).

And to Gameloft: Merci de votre hospitalité!

Recently Multiplayer investigated the lack of video games tied to some of this summer’s blockbuster movies. And one of the movies in question was Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight.”

So far, no movie-based console game has been revealed, but last week I spent some time playing the only “Dark Knight” title that’s been announced to date — the “Dark Knight” mobile phone game.

On the same day the film hits theaters, Glu Mobile will be releasing a 2D side-scrolling platformer reminiscent of Batman’s NES classics and centered on the events that happen in the upcoming film. It’s even going to have a Joker modeled after the late Heath Ledger’s interpretation of Batman’s crazed foe. Read more…

The time has come, the Autobots and Decepticons are going to finish their war, once and for all, and nothing is going to stop them, unless you get a call from your mom.

“Transformers G1: Awakening” will be coming to cell phones later this year courtesy of mobile publisher Glu, and anyone with a compatible handset will have a chance to help Optimus Prime and the Autobots finish their fight against Megatron and the Decepticons.

This new “Transformers” game is inspired by the simplified turn-based strategy genre that the “Advance Wars” series started, and uses the original Generation One Transformers from the animated series, and not the Michael Bay blockbuster from last summer, as the basis for the storyline and art style.

Read more…

Apple has toyed with opening their portable hardware to games. They dabbled with iPod — notably “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Peggle” — but it wasn’t an embraced platform.

That thinking changed with the iPhone, iPod Touch and an Apple-sanctioned software developer kit for both. Yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs started to make good on his promises to make his company’s new mobile toys a viable platform for developers.

There were not, however, any signals that Apple intends to enter the games business.

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So you’re a big-shot marketing man (or woman). You’ve decided that product placement is a good way to sell “Guitar Hero: Mobile.” You get on the horn with Marvel Comics and you arrange a deal that not-so-subtly plants a promotion for the game on page four of issue 18 of “Punisher: War Journal.”

Question for Multiplayer readers: Does it likely help or hurt sales that your product is featured in a scene that depicts torture, eye-gouging, and — oh yeah — takes place in a guitar store?

(Click the image to see the full page four from “Punisher War Journal” #18)

At the Microsoft’s press briefing at E3 2006, Bill Gates came on stage to introduce Live Anywhere, an ambitious company initiative to integrate the Xbox 360 experience into everyday life via mobile phones.

Nearly two years later, Live Anywhere has yet to materialize.

Is Live Anywhere dead? Here’s what Xbox Live exec. John Schappert (who took the stage for Microsoft’s keynote at GDC this year) told Multiplayer in an e-mailed statement:

“We continue to make progress against the vision laid out for LIVE Anywhere and remain committed to building out the network that connects you to your games, your friends and your entertainment in a variety of ways. The work we have done furthering the Xbox LIVE experience, including the launch of Games for Window – LIVE as well as integration with XNA and Zune, are examples of the many ways this original vision can come to life. We look forward to sharing more details on this in the future.”

With iPhone’s SDK on the horizon and the continued proliferation of Facebook applications — including one to tag profiles with Xbox 360 gamertags — we wondered what happened to the once-promising Live Anywhere. The impressive demonstrations from years back have seemingly remained nothing more than that: demos.

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San Francisco — “Tetris” is the “Slim Jim” of mobile games.

At least that’s what I learned at a panel I attended yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The first two days of the event are largely focused on satellite conferences, including one all about mobile games. I decided to check out a session called “TETRIS: Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever.”

“First off, ‘Tetris’ is the best game ever. Not the best mobile game, but the best game ever,” said speaker Rick Marazzani. He’s worked in casual games for over 12 years at places like Broderbund, Maxis/EA/Pogo and Digital Chocolate and is now a co-founder of mobile/web/PC development studio iQ212. And the man loves his “Tetris.” Or so I thought…

After a brief history of how “Tetris” came to be, including the rights debacle and commercialization of the game, he talked about its monumental success — over 70 million units have been sold across different platforms. For mobile games, he estimates that it garnered about one-third of the $140 million revenue that rights-holder EA made on handheld games in Fiscal 2007. It is currently the best-selling mobile game, accounting for 8.5% of all mobile games sold in North America.

Thus, Marazzani called “Tetris” the “Slim Jim of mobile games” (and “not rib-eye or filet mignon”), I guess because of its universal accessibility, although I’m not really sure why meat products were the analogies of choice. So far everything he had said pretty much made sense and was nothing new… But then he pondered the idea of “Tetris” being made today instead of back in 1985. With that in mind, what’s his advice to aspiring mobile game developers?

“If you want to make ‘Tetris’ for today, don’t make ‘Tetris,’” he said. … Wait, what?

Read more…

(Below is the beginning of a report filed at MTVNews.com.)

LAS VEGAS — Late last week, employees of the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa were taking down the signs and stands from the three-day DICE video game summit. They were packing up the framed art from the Into the Pixel exhibition. They were dismantling the show.

But sitting in one of the hallways amid this activity, Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, was revealing hopes and plans for things his company might build. One of those plans would, in a manner of speaking, put “World of Warcraft” on cell phones. There were other bold notions too.

Pearce has a deep voice, shaved head and goatee, a video game developer not unlike “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in look, if not in as surly a demeanor. He’s the executive vice president of product development at Blizzard, where work has begun on some major things, such as a “World of Warcraft” expansion; “StarCraft II,” a sequel to a game that has become a national pastime in South Korea; and some new massively multiplayer games, which the world first learned about when a job post for work on a next-gen MMO was posted on Blizzard’s Web site last year. About that job post: “That was not by accident,” Pearce told MTV News. “We have to figure out what’s next for Blizzard after ‘World of Warcraft,’ and we have to get the best people in the industry that we can get helping us figure that out.”

In the biggest surprise of his conversation with MTV News, mentioned right before the banging and clanging of the conference’s tear-down overwhelmed the interview and forced a relocation outside, Pearce confirmed that a very small team in Blizzard just might be creating a slice of “World of Warcraft” for cell phones.

Read the rest of this story at MTVNews.com

This is the second in a series of posts about the games I played and/or finished for fun for the first time in 2007. For comparisons’ sake, see my 2006 list. The previous post in the series was about my Xbox 360 games.

I love video games. There, I said it. I was never very good at hiding that, was I? I love games, and I try to play them as often as I can. I will try any video game that at least one person tells me is worth playing. I’ll play anything.

And I get angry (no exaggeration) with people who won’t try games I push on them.

So who am I to report that in 2007, across the spectrum of computer games, cell phone games and games on the iPod, the number of games I played for fun was… six.

Six. Only three of them were computer games.

Where did I go wrong?

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“Zombie Massacre” is one step closer to becoming a reality.

The upcoming Wii game by little-known developer 1988 Games turned heads when infamous video game movie director Uwe Boll quickly secured the rights to make the movie version.

A few months ago, I spoke with 1988 Games President Benjamin Krotin about “Zombie Massacre,” a hybrid of an on-rails, “House of the Dead“-type shooter and a “Crazy Taxi“-style driving game for the Wii. He seemed confident that it was only a matter of time before “Zombie Massacre” would find a publisher.

Now there will actually be a game to back up the announced film (set to begin shooting in 2009). Today, the game studio announced that the Irvine, California-based developer Papaya Studio (”Medal of Honor: Airborne,” “Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey“) will partner with 1988 Games to develop “Zombie Massacre.” In the press release, Papaya Studio President Lin Shen said, “We are extraordinarily excited to be collaborating with 1988 Games on Zombie Massacre, and we look forward to applying our game development expertise as we strive to make an unforgettable game for the Nintendo Wii.”

Meanwhile, AppAbove Games (”Armadillo Gold Rush,” “Jail Trail“) will help produce the mobile phone version.

Now, don’t tell me you don’t know these shows. Sure MTV isn’t for the old, but have we no sense of culture or history?

Last week I spoke to Steve Bergenholtz, CEO of newly announced game development company Beanbag Studios, about how he’s managing to turn two of the most famous shows in television history into video games — casual PC and cell phone games.

So you get the license, and then what?I asked this before proposing a bus-racing “Honeymooners” bus-racing game, mind you.

Bergenholtz’s answers, his comments on prospects of the game appearing on the Wii and a video of “The Honeymooners Bowling” follow…
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It’s clear that mobile phone games aren’t just for the casual gamers anymore, with publishers translating more and more franchises to your cellular phone. But rather than port over a tinier (and usually crappier) version of an existing game, Order of Shadows is a completely new title in the Castlevania series exclusively for your mobile phone — and it doesn’t suck.

Read more…