Why George R.R. Martin doesn’t play ‘Game of Thrones’ video games

The cast and creators of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” were in San Francisco this week for the Season 3 premiere, which airs Sunday. But along with the return of the show, fans have also been handed a new GOT video game on Facebook called “Ascent” which is officially in “open beta.”

The game had 100,000 people signed up waiting for it to finally launch in late February. And when it finally did, the stampede of users downloading it crashed the servers of the company that made it, Boston-based Disruptor Beam.

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Author George R.R. Martin, who wrote the “Song of Ice and Fire” books on which the HBO series is based, said he was impressed with the buzz the game is getting. But he also said he hasn’t played the game, or any of the other video games based on his GOT work, because in general he hasn’t played video games since the early 1980s.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like them,” Martin told the Los Angeles Times on the red carpet. “It was that I liked them too much. I think I probably lost a novel or two there.”

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