Del Toro tantalises with talk of videogame ‘earthshaker’
Fantasy film auteur Guillermo del Toro has intimated that he may wade into the games industry in a bid to become the genre’s Orson Welles.
Speaking of his disappointment with the conservatism of the videogame industry, the Mexican director behind Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade II and Hellboy told Wired: “In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Ka
ne of games.”
Asked whether he might be the man to deliver it, Del Toro replies: “I’ll be trying to make it. But I won’t be trying until after The Hobbit.”
Del Toro also spoke of his conviction that the fusion of multimedia entertainment platforms would soon replace conventional film narratives with a new form of interactive storytelling:
“In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform story engine. The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction…
“We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way… We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.
“Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don’t think so.”
