‘Up’ video game producer talks about look, spoilers
How do you bring a hit movie to video-game screens? Brian Wiklem, senior producer of the “Up” video game for THQ, said it’s about telling the story in between the moments of the film.
Brian Wiklem
“You try not to replicate everything you see on film, otherwise you’re playing something that you just watched, and we want to offer an expanded experience,” Wiklem said.
In “Up,” retired balloon salesman Carl Fredericksen is joined by a stowaway in his house, which is held aloft by balloons and en route to South America. Carl discovers young Wilderness Explorer Russell is along for the ride.
“In the film, there’s a big bonding and relationship aspect between Carl and Russell that gets evolved over the film, so we try to play up on that,” Wiklem said. “When you play the game, there’s constant bantering back and forth. And it’s not just gameplay-related; we’re also trying to develop the story a little bit further.”
Wiklem said the development team is concerned about movie spoilers but also figures 90 percent of the game’s audience will have seen the film.
“That’s always a concern, especially with how we opened the ‘Up’ video game by starting off with a major event that actually happens at the end of the film,” Wiklem said. “We were a little bit concerned about that, but we wanted to open the game with a very big moment to get the player sucked in.”
Wiklem said while it might seem easier to develop a video game based on animated visuals, he thinks expectations add another level of difficulty.
“People expect the games to look almost identical to a Pixar film or a DreamWorks film or any other film, 
for that matter,” he said. “It’s really hard to do that. I think it’s probably a little bit easier to do photo-realistic textures than it is trying to match how Disney-Pixar does their graphics and the details.”
The way they worked around that for the Nintendo Wii version of “Up” was to create an art design based on the style guide for the film, which was a stylized representation.
“It was a different way of dealing with the tremendous graphic differences between not just the consoles but also the film,” Wiklem said.
By Matthew Price
From Friday’s The Oklahoman
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