Yannis Mallat had what he calls a “defining moment” three years ago this month. The CEO of Ubisoft’s flagship game-development studio in Montreal, Mallat was pitching James Cameron and his producer, Jon Landau, on his idea for a videogame based on Cameron’s Avatar.
He got straight to the point: The real star of Avatar isn’t Jake Sully, the paraplegic vet at the center of the action. It’s Pandora — the world Cameron created. And Pandora is in trouble.
“When we approached Avatar,” Mallat says now, “the very first question we had was, ‘What does Jim want to express?’ The true meaning as we understood it.” He looks about, grasping for the word. “Cupidité en anglais? ‘Greed.’ Greed is the cancer of life. In one sentence we defined it: What are humans doing on Pandora?”
That insight won Ubisoft the gig. It also put Mallat on the spot. As the man who engineered Ubisoft’s 2003 relaunch of Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia series, he has a lot of cred in the game world. With James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, released Tuesday on multiple platforms, he’s putting all that and more on the line.
If Avatar delivers the way Mallat says it will, Ubisoft will break new ground in the convergence of games and movies — an effort that’s key to its corporate strategy. If not, the title will fail at something it’s ostensibly not even there to do: Providing a marketing lift for Cameron’s mega-budget space epic, which opens worldwide Dec. 18.
From Cameron’s perspective, the point of the game is to provide yet another way to explore the world of Pandora. Ideally, that not only satisfies fans but generates a sort of virtuous circle. “One of the objectives is to create a yearning for more,” says Landau. “The movie creates a yearning for more of the world of Pandora. The videogame creates a yearning for more as well. And then those things feed off each other.”
That’s assuming the game doesn’t suffer the fate of most movie-game tie-ins — instant dismissal by the fanboys. The desire to avoid that fate was one reason Cameron was auditioning game developers three years ago. “We exposed people to the breadth and scope of our movie,” says Landau, “and we challenged them to take advantage of that in their own arena. Our only guideline was, ‘Don’t contradict what we’re doing,’ and other than that, go at it.”
Before that, though, you get to play both sides. As a human “merc” on Pandora, you can suit up in body armor and help the Resources Development Administration in its quest for “unobtanium,” the superscarce mineral that goes for $20 million an ounce Earthside. Or you can join the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous population, and try to resist the RDA’s exploitation.
As Mallat puts it, “We’re asking the player, ‘What is worth fighting for?’ That’s the meaning of the movie — but only in the game will you be able to answer it your way and live with the consequences.”
Like the movie, Avatar: The Game makes a strong case for being in harmony with the environment. It also shows what happens if you don’t. The game’s AI has a feature that manages “global aggressiveness”: As a Na’vi, you can use Pandora’s fearsome creatures to your advantage — but if you don’t play nice, they’ll turn against you.
“It’s a big fighting game,” says producer Antoine Dodens, who led a development team that at the end numbered more than 300 people. “But underneath that there’s this message.”
“You have to see the planet as a living being,” explains Pascal Blanche, the game’s art director.
“And you’re a virus,” adds Patrick Naud, its executive producer.
For the better part of three years, Dodens and his largely French Canadian dev team spent most of their days behind double sets of locked doors in a remote corner of Ubisoft’s mazelike Montreal offices. Security was so high that employees in “the bunker,” as the Avatar zone was called, worked on computers with no internet connections and no USB ports.
But if their contact with the outside world was limited, they did have a direct pipeline to the film crew in Los Angeles. Soon after the movie got an official green light from Fox in January 2007, the leaders of the Ubisoft dev team flew to Hollywood to meet with the people in charge of sound and animation. They focused on such only-in-Pandora creatures as the Banshee, a giant pterodactyl harnessed by the Na’vi as a sort of living F-16: How does it fly? What does it sound like? “All the things we need to nail in order to deliver the same reptile,” says Naud.
In a presentation at the Santa Monica headquarters of Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment several months later, the Ubisoft team suggested they create a “Pandorapedia” — an in-game resource fans could use to delve deeper into the world of Pandora. Cameron and Landau liked it so much they hired a team of writers to put it together. The resulting compendium provides a detailed guide to every creature on Pandora and every RDA war machine, as well as such critical info as the cost of a phone call to Earth ($78,000 per minute).
In the two years that followed, key members of the Ubisoft team had frequent meetings in Los Angeles, and Cameron and Landau turned up in Montreal from time to time as well. In summer 2009, with the release date approaching, animation director Richie Baneham — celebrated for engineering the breakthrough animation of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings — spent a day with the Ubisoft dev team to make sure everything was right.
“My team was, ‘Oh my God,'” says Naud. “[Baneham]’s like a god.”
The point of such close collaboration was to make sure the game stayed faithful to Cameron’s vision. But it served another purpose as well.
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At a time when most entertainment companies still maintain strict boundaries dividing movies, television, home video and games, Ubisoft has publicly stated its ambition to pioneer a more integrated approach. Already the publisher of multiple best-selling Tom Clancy games, the company last year bought the rights to Clancy’s name in virtually all media. Shortly after that, it acquired Hybride Technologies, a digital-effects shop tucked away in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal.
Hybride — the name is French for “hybrid” — is best known for the work it did on Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City and Zack Snyder’s 300. In the short term, Ubisoft would like to compete with such top-tier movie-effects houses as Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, which was closely involved in the production of Cameron’s Avatar. Over the longer term, the company aims to make movies of its own.
That’s where Avatar comes in. “This is the most advanced project of the whole convergence strategy that Ubisoft is promoting,” says Mallat.
He’s well aware that as an art form, videogames have yet to mature. He’s also aware that interactivity can expand a story beyond what a movie could ever achieve. “I need to learn from Jim and Jon,” he says. “And they need to learn from us.”
Frank Rose is a contributing editor at Wired magazine. He is writing a book on how the internet is changing storytelling and posting on the subject at his Deep Media blog.
