Watchmen doesn’t lend itself to a standard video game, but the business
model of the big blockbuster movie says that you have to have one. But
it turns out that you don’t have to go the obvious route with it, and
Zack Snyder is doing some interesting things with the video game tie
in.
First of all, the game won’t be a console release but will rather be a
series of short games available for download. That was announced in the
trades, but the question still remained how the hell do you make a
video game out of this property? When sitting down with Zack Snyder
yesterday we got a pretty incredible answer as to what at least one of
the games would about: “Woodward and Bernstein are in New York
lecturing and the Comedian assassinates them,” Snyder said.
Snyder himself wrote the story for the game in an attempt to rescue it
from the suits. “What they were doing I thought was crazy, and I
couldn’t stop it, so I said let us do it,” he said. “The first thing I
said is that it can’t have anything to do with the book. There can’t be
any sequences from it, but there can be ideas.”
So it looks like these games (two announced, possibly more to come)
will have players filling in the missing pieces of history from the
Watchmen universe. You’ll never fight in the prison riot, but you may
play Rorschach and Nite Owl II in their glory days in 1970s New York.
That’s pretty damn cool.