3:00 a.m. 8.Oct.99.PDT For years there has been talk of a movie based on id Software's game Doom. At one point, Arnold Schwarzeneggar's name was
attached to the project. But the Doom project never got off the ground and another Dallas game developer will be the first to release a film based on a first-person shooter.
ADV Films, a Houston, Texas-based film and anime studio, is creating an animated film based on Sin, a first-person shooter from Ritual Entertainment, of Dallas,Texas.
Sin could have been done as a live-action film, but as an anime film it was cheaper to produce. Rather than develop an expensive live-action film that could cost US$50 million or more, ADV worked with a Japanese animation studio to
develop a one-hour film for less than $1 million.
"Any game that's converted to a movie is going to need a tremendous effects budget," said Mark Dochtermann, a programmer and co-founder of Ritual.
"Drawing it as a cartoon certainly simplifies that process."
That also means the content can be a little more violent, and the action more explosive.
"There's obvious limitations of what stunt men and special effects can do, so anime allows the story to be a little more fantastic," said Dochtermann.
ADV Films first approached Ritual in 1998 at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Atlanta to discuss adapting Sin to animation.
"We chose them because Sin has a story and characters behind it," said Andy
Orjuela, special projects coordinator for ADV Films. "They went in-depth with their characters. There's such a nice, intricate story that could be developed. It
seemed much better to go after that than anything else at the time."
The movie, tentatively planned for an April 2000 release, follows most of the Sin
storyline. The game's story revolves around Colonel John Blade, the owner of a private police force called the Hardcorps, which investigates why human mutations and monsters are popping up around town. He traces the
phenomenon back to a brilliant biochemist, Elexis Sinclaire. The object of the game is to wipe out the mutants, Sinclaire, and anything else with a gun or mutated body.
Some changes were made to make the story more appealing to both the American and Japanese markets. A few more female characters were added, and Blade is half-man, half-machine, a popular theme in Japanese anime.
Ritual was busy with other projects, so its involvement was rather passive. It provided ADV Films with its design documentation, which ADV used as the
basis of the film. Ritual's staff just saw a trailer of the film and was very happy with what it saw, Dochtermann said.
ADV Films would have liked to release the movie when the game came out last
year, but that didn't happen. The script went through seven rewrites in Japan, and had to be translated between English and Japanese each time, which delayed the process, said Orjuela. Having missed the game release, ADV now
is taking its time.
"We felt we weren't extremely rushed, since we already missed the Sin game release, so we felt, 'let's do a quality release,'" he said.
When released, the movie will be on VHS and DVD. The DVD version will come with a full copy of the Sin game.
