Whore Of The Orient to be McNamara's next game
Mad Max filmmaker George Miller has acquired the rights
The latest project for Brendan McNamara, the outspoken former head of Team Bondi, will be titled Whore Of The Orient. The game was revealed by filmmaker and KMM Interactive owner George Miller.
According to the Australian Financial Review, Miller "has also acquired the rights to Team Bondi founder Brendan McNamara's next game, Whore Of The Orient."
Miller is best known for Mad Max, but Miller's KMM became home to a number of Team Bondi staff after the studio closed following the release of the critically acclaimed LA Noire. He calls McNamara a "brilliant mind."
McNamara himself mentioned the project in an interview with Eurogamer earlier this month, calling it "one of the great untold stories of the 20th Century". He also revealed it would a similar to size to LA Noire.
Miller is also working on a new Mad Max game, and spoke about the way games and films had become part of on package.
"Multi-platform, that's the thing," says Miller. "Create once; publish many times, on multiple platforms. You create a world and then you go in to all the different platforms - your iPhone, your iPad, on the net," he explained.
It also explains that development for Miller's Mad Max game was set to happen in Sweden, until Miller saw the work of Team Bondi.
"What's fascinating, though, is that Team Bondi immediately went to work on Happy Feet Two. People can move from a game to a movie and be completely at home, because it's the same skills, process - the same game."
McNamara became the centre of a working practices controversy when internal emails from the Team Bondi studio were leaked.
Ha.
LODs, collision meshes, material batching, low poly modelling, vertex splits, modular layout, texture bakes, preserving textures in mips, game UVs, faking postprocessing, draw distances and occlusion, overdraw, shader complexity, game rigs, "responsive" animation, and much more. And that's just the art-related stuff.
I've seen the work that offline film folks do when they move over to games. Without a good couple of months of gaining experience working with realtime renderers and how they deal with things, the work they make simply cannot be used for production. Moving from game art to film may be easier in terms of not having the strict requirements of realtime rendering, but it's a completely different mindset in terms of understanding what kind of liberties one is then allowed to take that would never be feasible in a game. (There may well be other, more glaring, difficulties; my experience working in commercials is limited.)
I believe that calling them the same thing screams ignorance of both fields -- and it's a kind of thinking that really needs to be fought, because it results in, among other things, freelancers with film experience thinking that they can lecture game art courses. No points for guessing how employable the students would be.
Types of possible people offended by this project (GO!):
Let's see now: Asians, women's rights groups, career ladies of the evening who aren't from the geographical location in the title, cranky journalists looking for a fight, games ratings boards worldwide, parents groups, Cable news shows looking to shit on games again, people who hate George Miller for not making a Mad Max movie every year since the last one (or who hate Happy Feet, period) and so forth and so on.
Whatever. As usual, I'll buy it if it's good, play it to point and laugh at it if it's not.
*Sits back with popcorn*
What kind of person would think that "Whore of the Orient" was not offensive as a game title?
Answer:
Someone who thought hiring McNamara was a good idea.
"People can move from a game to a movie and be completely at home, because it's the same skills, process - the same game."
Erm, what?
Yeah, good luck with that...
And why anyone would want to make a game with McNamara after his infamy is beyond me. I guess Miller isn't a reader of game-related news. Ah well, I'll just be getting my popcorn and recliner...
"People can move from a game to a movie and be completely at home, because it's the same skills, process - the same game."
I've never laughed so much. Also...Whore Of The Orient?! Seriously?! I get it that it might make sense in context but it's as if he's on a role to piss as many people off as possible lately!
Also amazed that Miller would have anything to do with this guy. Just lost a bit more respect for Miller. Mind you, as others have said above, it's unlikely that this game will see the light of day for several years, if at all. McNamara's rep is out of the bag now and it's unlikely that another Rockstar will sweep in and save his bacon. Unless, of course, part of the deal is that Miller is going to be quite happy to keep writing the paycheques.
Now someone get McNamarra out of Australia and into a country where his employees can sue his face off if he takes the mick.