I keep meaning to give a shout out about this – Paul over at Spook Central has the cutscene scripts and original story synopsis from the Ghostbusters video game, straight from game witers, John Zuur Platten and Flint Dille.
Great information and some great comments from Platten and Dille themselves – check it out!
Awesome! thanks for this. I love how the script itself stands alone as a Ramis/Ankyroid approved GBIII!
So…. any word on the sequel to this fine game??
Ankyroid? ::Shudders::
No word yet on a sequel. IMO there won’t be a sequel unless a third Ghostbusters movie is made.
As for the script, I actually enjoyed some of the plot points more than the actual finished script.
Neat. There are some interesting ideas in the earliest proposal, like a pantheon of other Lovecraftian deities. I would like to read an even earlier draft.
And this script itself is good, though I like most of the changes that were made for the final game. The Ghostbusters shutting down the containment unit themselves, while amusing, doesn’t make a lot of sense and any effects of that aren’t really seen or mentioned again. On the flip side, explaining why a graveyard appears in Central Park actually gets explained here.
Hmmm…. I thought the general feeling was that if the game was a success, there would be more games.
The game was a success.
The game was a success, yes, but it’s all relative. It sold 1 million copies in a couple of months. Modern Warfare 2 sold something like 3 million in a week. Ghostbusters just doesn’t resonate with those 12-20 years old due to the last movie coming out over 20 years ago. If a new movie is made, Ghostbusters will once again be a part of the main stream, which should provide a good jumping off point for another game.
All valid points, Johnny. But comparing Modern Warfare and Ghostbusters is like comparing apples and oranges. There’s a HUGE time gap. They don’t even belong in the same category. The people who made the game new of the age of the franchise. And were realistic in their sales expectations, because of this. But even with that knowledge, the game sold beyond their expections within its first month of release. Expecting a sequal to the game, before a third GB film is released is NOT way beyond impossible. Also…Modern Warfare is the exception with its HUGE marketing campaign, current-ness (with the first Modern Warfare only a few years off, still fresh in people’s minds, and still many playing versus online via LIVE). They even went a step further and made an exclusive Modern Warfare Xbox 360 system, bundeled with the game. Plus add the release of all that around the holidays….yeah, well! Besides…not every game has to sell 3 million copies in a week (where do your numbers come frome?) to get a sequal. And there have been sequals to other games that haven’t sold nearly as much as Modern Warfare 2. It’s all relative, what the realistic expectations are for each individual title.
At least some sort of DLC is not out of the question?
Can’t see why they couldn’t put out some kind of skirmish mode… I’d love to pick the arena and drop in ghouls that I like to fight. I’d love to take on a room full of Slimers, or pack an area with Cultist Summoners, bringing the hate.
Thanks for the shout-out, Chris.
I suppose you’re right about comparing GB to COD Ryan, but given the fact that a patch for the 360 still has not been released and there hasn’t been one word about DLC, it seems that this franchise has once again been forgotten.
Just finished reading it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Actually, I’m wondering why they changed most of the things at all. Having the mandalas shutting and concentrating the spiritual energy to one concentrated point makes a lot of sense considering they kept the graveyard part in but didn’t bother explaining why the fuck it was there in the first place. Plus, the Thanksgiving parade was in there, too, so at least we got a feeling of what that was supposed to be since it was cut out *shakes fist at Terminal Reality*
The parade portion of the game getting axed still annoys me. Terminal Reality always sited that sequence when they’d talk up the Infernal Engine, talking about how it could handle all these thousands or people running around as all hell broke loose… And then nothing. Looking back on it, the game has some jarringly bad edits, and the parade is the biggest by far. Even though it is cut from the game, it’s somehow still referenced at least twice in the story and at one point I really thought I had somehow missed a chapter. That and for all the Infernal AI talk, I think there’s only two parts in the game where any sort of real crowd of people is present – in Times Square after Stay Puft is defeated (again) and in front of the library. Aside from that, you’d think this version of New York had a population of roughly 47 people.
Don’t get me wrong, for all my nit-picking, I still love the game, it’s the closest I’ll get to slingin’ a proton stream around a room full of expensive and fragile objects… But there’s no doubt that a lot of content had to get cut – even with almost an entire extra year added to development. Worse yet, now that the game is out the door, Atari has moved on and I believe we’ll likely never see anything else for it. No DLC, no patches (my GB2 logo still looks horrible on my flight suit), no nothing. At this point, I just greedily take what I was given and am just thankful I got a chance to play it at all…
Still, the thought of fighting a giant possessed parade balloon fills my heart with joy… Sadness and joy.