If Walt Disney was buried in a regular ol' cemetery instead of being cryogenically frozen and installed as one of the animatronics in the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, he'd probably be spinning in his grave right now.
What would Walt think about a Disney-published video game that sees gritty futuristic soldiers gunning down one another with all manner of weapons, or fending off murderous dinosaurs by stabbing the beasts repeatedly in the throat, sending fountains of blood gushing everywhere?
Actually, Walt might have thought it was kind of cool. But Buena Vista Games, the Mouse House's video-games division, is well aware that they're stepping outside the realm of Chicken Little and Kim Possible with Turok, a man-versus-man-versus-dinosaur shooter slated to hit the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year.
It's certainly not the first time a Disney property has trod into adult-themed territory -- the formerly Disney-owned movie studio Miramax was responsible for everything from the Hellraiser films to Kill Bill -- but until now, the bloodless virtual world of the 2003 shooter Tron 2.0 was about as close as Buena Vista Games got to overt violence in its offerings.
The new Turok game won't be classified by the Entertainment Software Rating Board until it's complete, but Buena Vista Games acknowledges that the 17-years-and-older "Mature" rating is a given, making it the first Disney video game aimed at adults. And how.
"Definitely, it's not insignificant, it's something they treat with a great deal of respect and caution," says Josh Holmes, whose Vancouver-based studio, Propaganda Games, is hard at work on bringing Turok to life for the game's release in the second half of 2007.
Taking Disney into a new and possibly controversial realm of violent video games isn't the only burden that Propaganda is shouldering. They're also keenly aware that the Turok video game franchise has hundreds of thousands of devoted fans, going back as far as 1997's critically acclaimed Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64. But each new sequel was less and less well received, and the franchise finally petered out with 2002's disappointing Turok: Evolution, two years before then-publisher Acclaim Entertainment went belly-up.
Holmes says the new Turok game will be a "reboot" of sorts for the series, similar to the way Batman Begins breathed new life into the Caped Crusader after the craptacular Batman & Robin all but destroyed the franchise. But the game will also be reinventing the character of Turok himself, morphing him from a warrior who finds himself in a mystical lost world to a grizzled futuristic commando, battling a rogue comrade-in-arms on a planet populated by genetically altered dinosaurs.
"The main connections (to the previous Turok games) are the character's name is Turok, he's Native American, there's a bit of a sense of spirituality, he's in a lost land full of dinosaurs and he's on an epic journey to survive," says Holmes.
The Sun was the only North American newspaper invited to a recent demonstration of the work-in-progress Xbox 360 version of Turok at Propaganda Games' offices in Vancouver, where members of the development team showed off the game's crisp visuals (Turok uses a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 software, the technology driving the Xbox 360 blockbuster Gears Of War) and demonstrated a handful of levels that are close to completion.
While the story will revolve around Turok's mission to stop his former special forces mentor and the madman's army of human soldiers, the dinosaurs are arguably the game's biggest stars, ranging from ruthless Velociraptor-like hunters to a lumbering T-Rex dubbed Scarface.
The game's wide variety of thunder-lizard fauna will be essentially neutral, and can be manipulated by clever players into acting as unwitting allies. In one demonstration, we saw Turok use a flare attachment on one of his many firearms to lure curious raptors into a squad of enemy soldiers. The resulting bloodbath took care of the bad guys without Turok firing a shot.
"At the end of the day, we found ourselves trying to infuse elements that have nothing to do with dinosaurs, like lions hunting on the savannah and how they stalk and attack their prey in packs," says Holmes.
"Even films like 28 Days Later and Dawn Of The Dead, the ravenous, never-stop quality of the zombies in that was another big inspiration -- how we can infuse that almost meth-addicted zombie feel to our raptors so they scare the crap out of you."
And they do. When a raptor gets close to Turok, the beast will leap on top of him while the camera pulls out to a third-person perspective. In some cases, surviving the encounter will require pounding furiously on a controller button to repeatedly stab the monster in the throat. It's intense, to say the least.
In another level, Turok battles a massive sea serpent-like monstrosity that won't be found in any paleontology textbooks. The encounter takes place in a cave surrounding an underground lake, and destroying the beast requires luring it close to geysers of flammable gas and igniting them with weapons fire.
Propaganda's vision for the new Turok is broad, and the game will include everything from stealthy assassinations to drivable vehicles to a robust online multiplayer component. It's a departure from the Turok games of yesteryear, and certainly from the comic book franchise that originally spawned the character in 1954. But Holmes is confident that fans old and new will take to the new Turok like a T-Rex to a freshly killed Brachiosaurus.
"At its essence, games are about gameplay, and we're trying to go back to all the things that were cool about the game experiences we had in Turok," says Holmes. "That idea of entering into this magical outdoor world and exploring that and being frightened and shocked and awed by these creatures that are there."
As for Disney, Holmes says that Buena Vista Games, who acquired Propaganda Games in 2005, fully supports the vision of the new Turok, and the company is eager to reach out to a more adult-oriented audience in addition to the young'uns served by its family-friendly fare. Still ...
"I'm not sure if you'd asked them a year and a half ago how they feel about stabbing a raptor in the gullet and watching blood spew out of it, whether they'd be like, 'Wow, that sounds exciting,' " says Holmes.
Rest in peace, Walt. If you can.
