Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell

Author:Jamie Russell [Russell, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: vl-nfcompvg
ISBN: 9780956507242
Amazon: 0956507247
Publisher: Yellow Ant
Published: 2012-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

A Tale of Two Empires

“Steven [Spielberg] would always beat the hell out of us when we played 8-player Tank together. Whereas I don’t think George ever played a videogame. It just wasn’t something he did.”

Hal Barwood, former LucasArts games designer

The press called them “The Dream Team” and for a while, it looked as if it were true. On 12 October 1994, at a press conference at The Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, three men stepped into the Verandah Room where rows of eager journalists waited for them.

Each was a leader in his field: Steven Spielberg, film director, producer and Hollywood powerhouse smirked behind a greying beard; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a buttoned down former Disney executive, who’d left the Mouse House under a cloud of negativity, was dressed as always in a shirt and tie. David Geffen, the media giant who created Asylum and Geffen Records, brought up the rear. He was last but by no means least. His $1 billion personal fortune dwarfed that of his millionaire colleagues.

Their announcement that day sent a shockwave through Hollywood although, in truth, the secret was already an open one. These three giants of the media industry were coming together to create a new studio, DreamWorks SKG. The aim was to create a 21st century powerhouse, a multimedia studio that would span live-action, animation and interactive entertainment.

As its name hinted, DreamWorks was not short on ambition. Over the coming weeks and months, grand plans were unveiled. There was talk of creating two studios, one live-action, the other feature animation; a record label; and a television division. There was also a dream of constructing a state-of-the-art studio facility on a thousand acres of marshland just north of Los Angeles International Airport at Playa Vista, the site where Howard Hughes once built his famous Spruce Goose seaplane. In retrospect, it would become a painfully apt metaphor. Like Hughes’s oversized aircraft, the ambitious DreamWorks project would fail to soar.

In 1995, though, the sky seemed to be the limit. Spielberg, the wunderkind, appeared to be on the verge of finally growing up: becoming a mogul as well as the industry’s most profitable filmmaker. For some, his investment in DreamWorks seemed to speak of a restless desire to build an empire, something similar to what his friend George Lucas had created years before on Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California.

True, Spielberg had Amblin, his $4 million facility housed on the Universal lot with its offices, cutting rooms, gym and wishing well with its own miniature shark (a nod to the director’s breakout hit). Amblin, though, was strictly a movie production company. DreamWorks had the potential to be something more, a fully-fledged multimedia studio that would operate in all fields of popular entertainment. And that included videogames.

Back in 1995, most of Hollywood was still in thrall to the buzzwords of “multimedia”, “interactivity” and “electronic entertainment”. The fact that few actually understood the reality behind those tags didn’t stem the tide of enthusiasm. Digital was the future and as multimedia titles

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