The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : LucasArts Chief Points to Flaws in Hollywood-Silicon Love Affair : Q
There’s a lot of talk these days about the so-called convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but the topic is old hat for San Rafael-based LucasArts Entertainment Co., one of three George Lucas-owned and operated entertainment firms.
Unlike the other two--Lucasfilm Ltd. and Lucas Digital Ltd., which is the parent of Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound--LucasArts is dedicated solely to creating digital interactive entertainment. Its Rebel Assault, which capitalizes on Lucas’ Star Wars property, has been widely hailed as the best-selling CD-ROM game ever. Other hits have included X-Wing, a Star Wars Space Simulator that was the top-selling PC game of 1993, TIE Fighter, its sequel and a graphical adventure called Day of the Tentacle.
But now that every major film studio and software maker is eyeing the market, LucasArts has finally hired its first chief executive officer, Randy Komisar. A Harvard Law-trained attorney, his experience includes stints as senior legal counsel at Apple Computer Inc., founder and vice president of Apple software spinoff Claris Corp., and chief financial officer of Silicon Valley’s Go Corp.
In his role as president and CEO at LucasArts, Komisar’s charge is to continue the firm’s rapid growth into the next century. We asked him his views on collaborations between Hollywood and Silicon Valley and the state of the game business.
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Q As one of the first, if not the first, companies to combine Hollywood and Silicon Valley people and products, what do you think is going wrong with this whole convergence phenomenon?
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A Well, Silicon Valley’s culture and perspective is distinctly different than that of Hollywood. Hollywood has taken a perspective of new media as a derivative or ancillary set of products for their movie properties, much like T-shirts or theme parks. On the other hand, Silicon Valley has focused more on the gee-whiz aspects of the technology, and it doesn’t have a firm grasp of the content the broad audience wants. So there’s a mismatch of perspectives and a mismatch of vocabularies.
The biggest mistake Hollywood is making is not treating this new medium as a distinct and different medium. To treat it as a derivative product shows a lack of understanding of the power of interactivity as a new tool. *
Q Everyone talks about how the Hollywood filmmaking business compares to the multimedia business. Does it?
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A Not really. Interactive entertainment is always compared to Hollywood, because of all the audio and video. But if you take a look at the real, core businesses, Hollywood makes its money from two very special circumstances of the movie business: one is the very, very high production costs, in excess of $30 million per film on average, and the other is the constrained distribution of movie theaters, a very limited channel.
As a result, Hollywood makes money on high interest from the capital and high distribution fees. That’s why six out of 10 movies allegedly lose money. But take a look at industries like the music business, where production cost is more like games, something like a half a million or a million and a half. And if you take a look at the channels of distribution, which allow several thousand products a year to reach the shelves, you see that business is much more similar to the game business.
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Q OK, but certainly Hollywood could have a place in it.
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A Certainly. Hollywood really understands how to tell a story, how to engage an audience, how to goose the production values that games are now becoming capable of doing. They have a lot to offer in terms of that experience and that knowledge. But they need to adapt it to the interactive medium that is available to them. I think there will be quite a lot of money lost. There are a lot of companies flailing around in this industry. Q Do game players really want actors and movie production values anyway?
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A If you take a look at the best-selling 50 products of 1993, you’ll see that only four of those products were based on movie properties. They were all Star Wars products, and they were all from us. Take a look at the first half of 1994, of the top 20 products only two were based on movie products. And they were both from us. We basically, in Rebel Assault, used actors to set the tone and provide the payoff. We didn’t bore them with linear video, which is the temptation.
You know, many game designers are just frustrated film buffs. And I think the Hollywood people have yet to understand what makes a great game. So you end up with an overemphasis in linear video.
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Q What’s the biggest problem facing the multimedia entertainment industry today?
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A One of the biggest issues is bringing in great talent, and making sure we have a steady supply of people who understand the medium and have a vision for how it can be used for entertaining and informing people. That’s going to take some time, to really get to a point when we’ve got people of that inherent understanding and vision.
Gina Smith is a technology writer, and host of the upcoming Internet Show airing on PBS affiliates around the country this holiday season.
