Marlon Brando has cotton balls stuffed in his cheeks. In five months the legendary actor will die of lung failure, but now he's deep in character, summoning the spirit of the capo di tutti capi one last time in his home on Mulholland Drive. "I would like you to go see this man and discover what makes him tick," he says in Don Corleone's strained whisper. "Then we can make him an offer and see if justice truly is on our side."
The line wasn't in The Godfather or either of the sequels, but it will be in The Godfather game this fall. To capture Corleone's final performance for gamemaker Electronic Arts, creative director Philip Campbell showed up at Brando's Los Angeles mansion with a portable DAT recorder, a shotgun mike, and a lavalier mike. "It was just the two of us, sitting in his living room," says Campbell, who spent three hours with the actor in February 2004 recording the game's script. "When we signed the deal to do The Godfather, we never dreamed we'd actually get Brando."
Brando seemed to know exactly what Campbell was after. "He told me that his performance in the movie was really created by the audience, that he didn't feel like he was acting," Campbell says. "He seemed to understand that the performances in a videogame are created interactively as well." Brando even treated Campbell to an impromptu reprise of the "I coulda been a contender" scene from On the Waterfront. "As I walked out, I remember feeling like I'd actually been standing there in front of that desk," Campbell says, "and that he'd granted me a favor."
And there you have it. Videogames and Hollywood have been colliding in slow motion for two decades. But the collaboration between the man many call the greatest actor of all time and the gamemaker acknowledged as the most powerful in the world is a sign that the show is finally on - and coming in November to a console near you.
For EA, it's not a moment too soon.
Like Brando in his prime, EA towers over its peers. With $3.1 billion in sales in fiscal year 2005, the Redwood City, California, company publishes best-selling, critically acclaimed titles year after year. The bulk of its revenue comes from the EA Sports division, whose flagship, Madden NFL, has sold 35 million copies in 16 years and helped the gamemaker infiltrate the inner circle of professional sports. It's not unusual to see big-name athletes like Roger Clemens, Daunte Culpepper, or Randy Moss drop by headquarters to sign a contract, chat, or pick up a new release.
But with titles in 17 categories, from golf to Nascar to soccer to hockey, EA is running out of sports. The company more than doubled in size from 2001 to 2005, but in the past six months, revenue has started to fall. Fourth-quarter sales were down 3 percent last year from 2003. In the first quarter of this year, revenue dropped 8 percent and earnings plummeted 91 percent, sending the company's stock price spiraling nearly 30 percent in a month. The revenue slide is at least partly due to the impending release of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, which have caused consumers to delay their purchases, but it's also evidence that EA hasn't had a breakout hit in a while. The success of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto series and Microsoft's Halo and Halo 2 have overshadowed everything EA has done for the past few years. Now almost desperate for growth opportunities, EA is moving in on the burgeoning movie-game market, trying to insinuate itself into Hollywood the way it has done in sports.
EA started shifting its focus south when it bought DreamWorks' videogame division (known for titles like Lost World: Jurassic Park) in 2000. Two years later, the company opened its own development studio, EALA, and last September it put one of its brightest young executives, Neil Young, in charge. This summer, EA began unveiling a series of new titles: Batman Begins, to be followed by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fifth installment in the series, in November, and before the end of the year, two of the most highly anticipated film-related games ever, From Russia With Love, featuring Sean Connery himself, and The Godfather.
Movie games have of course been around almost as long as there have been consoles to play them on. Gamemakers like the genre because they can piggyback on the marketing dollars the studios spend promoting their films. But for the most part, the games themselves have been horrible - starting with ET, which was so awful that its publisher, Atari, buried thousands of unsold copies in the desert and plunged into bankruptcy. The titles have improved a bit, but Young, who oversaw development of the Lord of the Rings franchise, is still looking for a "Citizen Kane moment." "Can a videogame make you cry?" he asks. "If we can get there, we'll broaden the market dramatically."
EA moved to Hollywood thinking it had the business figured out. After all, sports and movies have a lot in common. Both require negotiation with huge stars and their go-betweens, whether it's Tiger Woods and his agent or Marlon Brando and his lawyer. And both mean deals with big corporate partners: a 15-year, $790 million pact with ESPN to do sports titles or a multimillion-dollar license from Paramount to develop The Godfather. Besides, a game is a game, whether it's about football or a fictional spy with a penchant for hot women and cold martinis.
And yet, the road from Redwood City to Hollywood has been bumpy. While EA is responsible for three of the biggest movie-based franchises ever - the LOTR, Harry Potter, and James Bond series have sold a combined 71 million units - subsequent box office-to-console success has been as elusive as Tom Cruise's Oscar. Truth is, the LA office has been a disappointment. When EALA opened, the plan was to reach a head count of 1,000. Instead, it topped out at 380. The latest Bond and LOTR games (Rogue Agent and The Battle for Middle-Earth, respectively) were produced in Los Angeles, but both flopped. Rogue Agent was panned by the gaming press. The Battle for Middle-Earth has sold only a quarter as many units as previous LOTR releases. Oversight of both franchises has since been yanked back to corporate headquarters. And then there was Catwoman. The movie was awful; the game was arguably worse. It sold just over 100,000 copies. Activision's Spider-Man 2 sold 3 million.
Of the top 10 movie-related videogames in 2004, EA published only one - Bond 007: Everything or Nothing. (By contrast, in February, EA owned 9 of the top 10 sports titles.) Two of its Southern California competitors, Activision and THQ, filled out the rest of the list. Young won't cop to the studio being a failure, but he does slip into corporate euphemisms like "refocusing" and "rebalancing." Just four months after Young took over the EALA office, he laid off 60 staffers, leaving the survivors to focus on first-person-shooter titles.
So, what happened? As it turns out, sports and movies are vastly different industries. And Silicon Valley is a long way - at least culturally - from Hollywood.
A hit movie game is driven by the quality of the film it's based on. "Only about a third of movies make money. And only about a third of games make money," says EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon. "Therefore, only one-ninth of movie games can make money." In other words, good movie/bad game, EA loses money. Bad movie/good game, EA probably still loses money. Bad movie/bad game, forget it. The sweet spot is more like a pinpoint.
It's almost impossible to create a good movie-based game if the film studio doesn't make time for gamemakers' protracted production schedules, which can be anywhere from 18 to 24 months. This timeline works fine in sports. The football season kicks off at the same time every year, and every year the NFL looks pretty much the same. But to release a game on the day a movie comes out, the creators often need to enter preproduction before a studio even green-lights a script. That far in advance, it's difficult to know whether the movie will be any good, much less get a strong sense for the plot, characters, and aesthetic. When game development is rushed, as it was with Catwoman, the results can be dreadful. EA and Warner Bros. agreed to put together the game in just nine months. "It's not the worst game ever made," says Jason Hall, chief of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the videogame division of WB. "But the practice of green-lighting a game without enough time to get it out is over."
EA is learning another tough Hollywood lesson: Even when a movie seems a sure bet, like Spider-Man 2 did, EALA has to fight to get rights to it. Years of successful negotiations with professional sports leagues have given EA what amounts to right of first refusal with sports games. In Hollywood, EA execs have to queue up with everyone else just to pitch the studios.
For EA, the good news is that Hollywood studios no longer have to be convinced of the value of movie-based videogames. After all, between royalties and upfront licensing fees, which add up to about 18 percent of sales, a studio stands to make as much as $40 million on a hit title. But in this high-stakes environment, the movie houses are ruthless negotiators. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment recently added a quality clause to its licensing deals. If a game doesn't receive ratings of 70 or better on sites like Metacritic.com, royalty rates are opened for renegotiation. It's not trivial language. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Catwoman, both made by EA for WB Interactive, received a 56 and a 46, respectively. (EA's sports titles typically get a 90 or higher.) Hall is unapologetic. "Look, we're being approached by people who want our licenses," he says. "It's not like we're shoving them down their throats."
A game industry veteran, Hall is even starting to wonder whether he needs outside developers. WB Interactive partnered with EA on Batman Begins, but now that Hall has a $40 million budget from his parent company, he's considering making the upcoming Dirty Harry game, featuring Clint Eastwood's voice, without outside help. "Will we ultimately push our partners out?" Hall asks, smiling. "It has to be a thought that exists in their minds."
Jillian Goldberg has Tiger Woods' number in her cell phone. The VP of marketing at EA, she has been working with Woods for close to eight years. She gives him fashion advice, and he tells her it's about time she found herself a husband. "Tiger loves that he has his own game," Goldberg says. "But he also loves the fact that he's better than I am at Madden NFL and NBA Live."
So it goes with EA in the sports world. Athletes love EA games. EA loves Woods because he's crucial to the franchise. He's involved in the creation and his face shows up on the box. For all its attention to sports figures, the company has been myopic about cozying up to movie stars. The irony is that EA is trying to crack a town that's built on catering to celebrity. "In Hollywood, they're willing to drive across town to get the right kind of bottled water for a director because they realize it's good business to keep that guy happy," says Seamus Blackley, who was a key player in the development of the Xbox platform at Microsoft before he became an agent at Creative Artists Agency. "There's a real cultural divide."
It's not that EA avoids working with A-list talent. A famous actor can bring good publicity, especially if that actor is integral to the film. That's why the company negotiated for two months with Sean Connery's agents to get him to participate in From Russia With Love. And actors can also bring unique insight. For the first Lord of the Rings title, Ian McKellen did some Gandalf voice work for the game before shooting his film scenes and in the process took time to convey his character to EA's developers.
But the cost and hassle of dealing with Hollywood is great, and EA has shown a low tolerance for unions, agencies, lawyers, and all the egos that come with them. EA vice president Pat O'Brien recalls one encounter with an award-winning actor he ultimately abandoned because of a conversation with the actor's attorney. "He had done research on Carrie-Anne Moss and her pay in the Matrix games," O'Brien says. "He said, 'I'll be fucked if I'm not at least getting Carrie-Anne Moss money for so-and-so.' So that was that. I thought it was pretty funny that someone had used the phrase 'Carrie-Anne Moss money.'"
Why did he give up so easily? According to an internal EA survey, the key factor in determining whether consumers will buy a game is the quality of play, followed by graphics. Voice-overs come in dead last. EALA's Young puts the company's approach bluntly: "We are not - nor can we ever afford to become - starfuckers."
He's not just saying that. Peter Jackson is upset with the EA development team for showing little interest in his input when crafting the early LOTR games. When it came time to strike a deal for a game based on his upcoming remake of King Kong, EA wasn't invited to pitch. It went to Ubisoft. "EA is in the brand business, not the people business," a Hollywood source says. "With Jackson, they showed that individual creative relationships don't matter to them that much."
EA executives insist they have a good relationship with Jackson. "We had a creative partnership with him, which was a surprise to us," says Bing Gordon, referring to LOTR development. But it's pretty clear that Gordon didn't think of it as a 50-50 proposition. "Lord of the Rings didn't need Peter Jackson's involvement, but we had it."
And then there's the Coppola incident. In April, Francis Ford Coppola said during a TV interview that he was upset with Paramount for selling the rights to make The Godfather into a game. "I knew nothing about it. They never asked me if I thought it was a good idea. I think it's a misuse of film," he said.
Coppola may be misremembering. Several EA staffers tell of being invited to the director's Napa Valley offices to peruse his Godfather archives early in the game's development. But such stories have a way of getting around Los Angeles. CAA client Lorne Lanning, the creator of the popular Oddworld gaming universe, recently decided to nix a partnership with EA that would have meant developing a game and then shopping it as a film idea. Instead, he opted to approach Hollywood first. If EA wants a shot at whatever Lanning and a movie studio come up with, it'll have to get in line. "Why would we put the fate of our property in the hands of a publisher like EA?" asks Lanning's partner Sherry McKenna. "Look at the Coppola situation. It doesn't matter how much power you have if you have difficulties with the creative talent in other media."
It's springtime in Redwood City and excitement is building around the game version of what the American Film Institute ranks the third-best film of all time (behind Citizen Kane and Casablanca). The hallways at EA's headquarters are lined with Godfather storyboards. Promotional posters adorn cubicles. The programmers are buzzing, and so is the press. By late April, The Godfather had appeared on the cover of 18 gaming publications.
To keep the chatter going until the game's November release, EA has put a Hollywood-size marketing budget behind its publicity campaign. For a February event in New York City's Little Italy, the company brought out Robert Duvall and James Caan, both of whom have reprised their roles for the game. At the E3 trade show in May, EA won praise for the elaborate set where it demo'd the game - a replica of Don Corleone's office.
No one at EA will say how much the company has spent on The Godfather, but more than a hundred programmers have been toiling away on it. The Godfather represents EA's first entry into the "open world" or "living world" genre, in which a player can roam without being tied to a predetermined path. It's an overt nod to the success of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto series.
EA is rolling out a few of its own innovations for The Godfather. The Mob Face feature, first developed as the Game Face for the Tiger Woods franchise, allows players to customize the look of the main character. And the game is more than just a first-person shooter. Players must consider the consequences of their actions. Extreme violence might make for a good mafia soldier but not a great godfather. The point is to build respect and a "family." Whether these incremental advances will add up to something so good that it'll make gamers cry, well
At this point, EA doesn't need to come up with a Citizen Kane moment. It just needs to regain its reputation as a top-flight, go-to gamemaker. "The Godfather is one of those projects that creates excitement for the industry, brings in new customers, and reinvigorates the space," says David DeMartini, the game's executive producer. "It's too valuable a property to screw up."
Duff McDonald (duffmcd@mac.com) wrote about the Wired 40 in issue 13.06.
credit Background: Getty; Characters: EA
credit EA
Screenshot from Batman Begins.
credit EA
Screenshot from The Godfather.
credit Joe Pugliese
Neil Young, head of EALA
