Among the games I recently covered when discussing the announcements at the Game Awards one of them happened to be Ark 2, sequel to the massively popular multiplayer dino-slaying and capturing game and also happened to star Vin Diesel as one of the main characters in the story. Now normally this would just be another case of a famous celebrity being brought in to make a game more popular just like how they do in the movies but another interesting piece of information has made this situation far more intriguing, Vin Diesel is actually working on developing the game itself!
To be more specific, he is working directly with Studio Wildcard, the game’s developers, as a ‘President of Creative Convergence’ whatever that means and as such is actually contributing the the making of the game itself rather than just his acting talent. Now while this might seem strange to many people, including myself, apparently he was a massive fan of the original game and spent thousands of hours within it, including amazingly enough reporting many of the big bugs in the game for them to get ironed out. Vin Diesel as a QA tester, never thought I’d see the day.
Now while this is all well and good just because you love a game doesn’t make you a good designer however upon doing more research I came across a fact I had never heard about before, he actually created a game development company called Tigon Studios. Now here is where things get very interesting, this company mostly creates games that use the actor’s looks and lisence but one game they helped develop back in the day, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, is considered a great game and a cult classic of the stealth-action genre and so as such this move will actually hold some interesting talent behind the wheels. This has been a wild ride of new information, all these new interesting facts and discoveries, I think I may need to sit down. Anyway this news will certainly make some poeple very excited for the game and I wonder exactly how much influence the star will have on the development, I suppose we shall wait and find out!
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.