“…it was about being true to Wolverine’s character, and if that means lopping guys’ heads off or ramming claws into their chest, then that’s what it’s got to be.”
One of the most well-known and loved characters in comics, Wolverine has experienced a huge resurgence of popularity in recent years, largely due to his role in the X-Men film franchise, as played by Hugh Jackman. Now, the hero is getting his own origin story film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine with Jackman in the lead role.
Additionally, Activision and developer Raven software are hard at work developing a game based on the character and featuring plot elements from the film, as well as a sizable chunk of the film’s cast. However, the game is set to be not just another film game, as it sets out to give players the opportunity to play as Wolverine as never before. Players can take full advantage of his abilities and adamantium claws and attack enemies like a wild animal, ripping enemies limb from limb.
At a recent press event held for the game, GameZone got a chance to sit down with Dan Vondrak, Project Lead on the game, and ask him a few questions about the game’s development and how it relates to the upcoming film.
How much of the game’s storyline follows the plot of the film? How much did you guys create?
Dan: If you go see the movie, you’re pretty much going to see 90 percent of that movie content in the game. It’s really tied very closely to the movie, but we also added in another 30 or 40 percent on top of that that’s our side-story, with some comic book stuff in there. It’s really an interesting story; we started getting early versions of the script from Fox after we’d already started doing our version of the game, and we just started integrating both of those. Sometimes we’d find some of our ideas in these script updates coming from Fox [laughs]. We were never told officially that they were really inspired by us, but the two stories are almost the exact same thing, so they both flow together really well.
What kind of input did the film’s creators have toward the creation of the game?
Dan: Not a whole lot, honestly [laughs]. We took from the script what we felt was cool and appropriate. We’ve played through crappy movie games before where it wasn’t anything like the movie, but we didn’t want to be an exact copy either. So, we wanted to have all of these cool twists and characters and Marvel characters that aren’t in the movie. So Fox in the end provided tons of content for us, but it was never that they wanted this or that in the game from the movie.
