BIZ: What are your thoughts on Hollywood-licensed games? Landau: I think that certainly video game extensions of big movie brands are successful from a business standpoint, in large part because you have a market phenomenon that goes with the movie. Activision has done a great job translating the Spider-Man experience to the game.
It's different from the movie. Playing the Spider-Man game is very different from watching the Spider-Man movie, but it's a positive experience and it's still driven by the Spider-Man brand and who Peter Parker and Spider-Man are. It's not the same as watching Tobey Maguire, Kirstin Dunst and James Franco go through their love triangle onscreen.
Nobody would want to play that. You do want to swing through the streets of Manhattan and beat up bad guys. If the whole movie was swinging through the streets of Manhattan and beating up bad guys, nobody would want to go to the movie.
So that's the balancing act between the mediums. They will continue to influence each other and there are certainly games to be sold on the backs of movies and there will be movies to be sold on the backs of games. But they will still fundamentally remain two separate businesses for the most part.
BIZ: Did you see games borrowing from Hollywood in the early days? Landau: Well, you could argue that a lot of the classic games like Defender, Galaga, Space Invaders and Missile Command were to some extent fueled by Star Wars . They weren't a direct exportation of Star Wars , but your basic dogfight and laser gun experience was really [defined] in Star Wars .
It was just translated into more creative ways. I think that what a bunch of those early arcade games did was opened people's eyes to the ability to tell stories in worlds you couldn't have otherwise conceived. It also allowed you to create games in worlds that you might not have otherwise told a story in.
I don't think that Asteroids was necessarily shaped by Star Wars , but Asteroids was part of the Star Wars phenomenon. Even though all you had was essentially an arrow shooting dots in outer space, you could pretend you were dodging asteroids like Han Solo. It's hard to imagine today that Asteroids was a space experience.
But given the limitations of the medium, it was a very effective space experience. Today you could probably play it on a cell phone and have a better experience than you did at the arcade.
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