Sitting in the swanky Paramount Hotel in Manhattan, Tom Zito pauses, spoon poised over a bowl of oatmeal. At 47, he wears his baseball cap with Spielbergian aplomb. He signs off on production budgets, shooting locations, and script rewrites. He hires directors and wrestles with the ratings board.
He casts buxom starlets and Tiger Beat heartthrobs with a self-satisfied grunt and a flurry of press releases. As president of Digital Pictures, Zito revels in the bigwig perks of a Hollywood executive producer.
Except that Zito doesn't produce films. He cranks out live-action, interactive CD-ROM videogames like Night Trap, Sewer Shark, Supreme Warrior, and Corpse Killer. Bucking the trend toward realistic, computer-rendered graphics, Zito's games are a mosaic of video footage strung together with a proprietary software code. While most game developers are working to make their graphics look more like film, Digital Pictures is trying to make its video stars seem more like computer-spawned sprites. At as much as US$2.5 million per production, Zito's betting serious bucks on the idea that videogame junkies prefer cinematic wallop to Doom-style navigability.
"You make sacrifices using computer-rendered graphics, and you make sacrifices using video. Zito is reminding everybody of what you can do when you make a different set of sacrifices," says Carl Goodman, who curates new media exhibits for the American Museum of the Moving Image. "It's a thankless job, because he's had to suffer the slings and arrows of hard-core gamers who thumb their noses at these full-motion videogames."
For die-hard thumb slingers, no full-motion game can match the intense interactivity of computer graphics - yet. But Zito doesn't aspire to be the messiah of the twitchy-finger contingent. He is a producer. And so he's explaining how the best game designs simulate the immersion and audience identification of the motion picture experience. To drive the movie point home, Digital Pictures's latest releases use the eloquent body parts belonging to the likes of almost-real actors Mike Ditka, Yasmine Bleeth, Debbie Harry, and erstwhile teen idol Corey Haim.
Will this kind of marquee power sell videogames? Zito shrugs over his empty plate. "Look, this is a hip business. If the game's not good, it's not gonna fly." Which means, one hopes, that there are no Waterworlds in Tom Zito's digital picture.
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Rendering Refusenik
