A tidbit from an awesome interview with Noah Falstein:
"Ron and David and I had a brief discussion about whether, when Ron was working on Thimbleweed Park, whether we might talk to Spielberg about doing a retro game version of the next Indiana Jones film that’s in the works now. And, you know, given that Steven loved those games, I suppose that’s possible.
But, you know, it occurred to us that the budget for a Thimbleweed Park style game would be a small part of the marketing budget for a movie like the next Indiana Jones movie. So, we still have had some discussions that might be fun thing to do.
But, I think Ron is a little burned out on doing retro games right now. So, we’d have to persuade him if we wanted to have him involved on that. And it would be great to have the three of us back together on that project."
It kind of is, but adventure games are far from the mainstream retro. I could see this happening with other IP’s. Maybe Stranger Things in a limited scope. It’s their time period, there are kids and they probably could use this kind of promotion because it’s nerdy. But Indiana? Nah. Only if Spielberg really is a hardcore fan and I don’t think he is. Were there any Lucasarts adventure games references in Ready Player One?
Retro is popular right now, but not cutting edge. Don’t confuse the two.
That said, the point n’ click genre is not all that popular anymore. It has its loyal fanbase, but we’re a minority, a niche audience. If the studios want to make a game to promote the new movie, they’re not going to go for a niche genre. They’ll go for something with more mass appeal. So that’ll probably mean some 3rd person action adventure type thing in the vein of Tomb Raider (oh the irony!), the newer Prince of Persia games etc… Especially considering they’ll probably want console ports as well, and the P&C genre isn’t exactly controller-friendly.
But that would either look worse than a retro-inspired P&C adventure, or cost significantly more. A “cheap” P&C adventure could be released for tablets or smartphones to reach a bigger audience (would that be a point & touch adventure then?).
I’d rather they’d add Hal Barwood to the team and do an original script instead. Based on our earlier discussion, that 5th movie is likely not going to be a great entry in the series.
For that to work it would have be distibuted for free and it would have to be cheaply done. Probably meaning the devs would have to work with little to no pay again.
Playing twp on Andoid on a big screen with a PS3 Controler is awesome. I never thought it would work well, but it does. I asume it’s the same on a Playstation. Which I don´t have, so I don´t know for sure.
Broken Sword 5, Day of the Tentacle, and most Telltale games also play very well with a controller.
To a large extent that includes games without controller support as well, provided the game plays well with a keyboard. So Monkey Island, for example, will play much better than your average modern “what’s a keyboard hurdurdurrr” extravaganza like Gemini Rue.[1] (The best I can say about that game’s awful controls is that I got used to it.)
TWP can be played either like a Telltale game or like Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken/Monkey Island with a custom controller scheme bound to mouse + keyboard. TWP works well both ways.
[1] NB It’s an annoying trend. This game came to mind purely because I liked it quite a bit and I played it recently.
I don’t know about hardcore, but today I’ve been reading the interviews in The Art of Point & Click Adventure Games, where Ron (Rob?1) Gilbert actually mentions that Spielberg was a “huge gamer”, who wrestled the mouse from him during a demo of Indy3.
1 A “Rob Gilbert” is credited for Maniac Mansion on the page preceding Ron’s interview, and it’s by far not the only mistake I noticed on the first 60 pages .
On the Playstation it is even better with the touchpad (which is something the PS3 didn´t have yet) of the PS4, so you can freely move the cursor with your finger.
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