metagame

Global Pres­i­dent of 2K Christoph Hart­mann has told MCV that Bioshock has the poten­tial to emu­late the Star Wars series.

Yeah, so, good luck. I don’t want to get into all the ways in which Star Wars cre­ates like­able char­ac­ters, a fan­tasy galaxy, and an opti­mistic his­tory for itself that Bioshock, with sur­vivor hor­ror as its bedrock, can never have. But what we can observe is the real­ity of enter­tain­ment today.

Not even the recent Lord of the Rings films have been or will be inca­pable of build­ing a fran­chise that will come to close to Star Wars. And while I do put Star Wars on a pedestal, my judg­ment isn’t about qual­ity of Star Wars vs LOTR or Bioshock. It’s about the real­i­ties of today vs the late 70s and early 80s. Today means hav­ing a new block­buster movie and AAA video game every other week. It’s about hav­ing the inter­net, three gam­ing con­soles, iphones, etc. We swim in so many enter­tain­ment options that I don’t think we will ever again have a mass cul­ture event in film or con­sole video games. Noth­ing as sweep­ing and per­sis­tant as Star Wars became after the orig­i­nal trilogy.

(As an aside, we will have new big cul­tural influ­ences in enter­tain­ment and in games, but it will prob­a­bly come in a new medium. World of War­craft is the clos­est we’ve seen in a decade.)