In an interview with HollywoodReporter, Red Mile Entertainment president, Glenn Wong, revealed that their Sin City game license covers the seven Sin City graphic novels but not its movie adaptation.
This means that Red Mile won't be able to use the likeness or voices of the movie's stars such as Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba. It also means that the game won't follow the movie's story nor will it benefit from a tie-in release with the upcoming Sin City 2 movie.
"It's just one of those calls you have to make in the games industry," Glenn Wong explained. "We decided that the 'Sin City' graphic novels, with their dark images and nonlinear stories, would work better as the basis for an interactive game. We don't have to track the linear movie screenplay and try to translate it into a game; we prefer to create an original story based on the characters from the books which, we think, will make for a longer, deeper video game experience."
Needless to say, the books' license is much cheaper than the movie's, but Wong insisted that price was never a factor when they chose it. "We wanted to go back to the source material instead of the filtered version that people saw on the big screen", he said.
"This is going to be an interesting challenge for us. We want to appeal to the many faithful fans of the graphic novels and, at the same time, attract the movie audience. We'd like to think that we'll be able to capitalize on whatever awareness of 'Sin City' is generated by the second film. But, frankly, I don't even know when that's scheduled to be released."
Finally, Wong revealed that they plan to release a Sin City game sequel every 2 years. " We'd like to finish game No. 1 in a year and a half," he said, "and then turn out a sequel every other year after that. The beauty of Frank Miller's work is that it's so rich with so many characters that, once a gamer gets a real good taste of 'Sin City,' they're not going to say, 'OK, I've seen it all.' They're going to say, 'So when do I get more?' "
The game is already six months into production and is scheduled for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii release in 2009.
"All I can say is that it will be heavily story- and character-driven, with multiple crossing story lines, and it will contain the same kind of violence, the same kind of sexiness, the same kind of edginess that are the hallmark of the graphic novels," said the game's producer, writer and designer, Flint Dille. "There will be a wide variety of things for the gamer to do, from fighting to shooting to driving. We're trying to deliver it all in a very stylized, very bold, very surprising way. What makes this so dangerous a project is that, quite frankly, the source material is so damn good. It sets a very high bar for us to hit."
