James Lee 16:53 (BST)
19/08/2008

Jos Ruffel, business development executive at Sidhe Interactive, has spoken out about the company's experience creating the Speed Racer game, saying the title's success was hampered by the movie's poor reviews.

Speaking on the Licensed Game Process panel at GCDC, Ruffel discussed what it was like to develop a game based upon a movie license which was better received. He explained that, despite overall good reviews, the game suffered from the unpopularity of its film counterpart.

"When you make a game based on a license you really are playing roulette - you don't know how the film is going play out in the market," he said.

"When we were first asked to do Speed Racer the property it was incredible, it was very exciting. It was a film by the Wachowski brothers and it was about car racing - awesome that's going to make a great game."

Describing Speed Racer as one of "Warner's biggest disappointments", he told the audience how he thought it impacted on the game's retail performance.

"We're in a unique situation with the game, we're like 40 Metacritic points above the film - usually the film and the game mirror each other quite closely on review scores... We released on the same time frame as Ironman, which was very successful film. The games didn't review very well - but we know that Ironman games sold very well.

Metacritic scores the Wii Speed Racer title at 69 while the film was scored 37.

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