Grave Gamer News & Views — gabe newell

Half-Life, Portal Getting the J.J. Abrams Big Screen Touch?

With both the Star Trek and Star Wars film franchises residing on his To-Do List, you wouldn’t be wrong to figure director/producer J.J. Abrams is the busiest sonuvabitch in all of Tinseltown.  That’s why it came as a bit of a fanboy shock to learn the genre hero is looking to put some of Valve’s biggest video game franchises onto the big silver screen.

During a fascinating talk at today’s DICE summit about storytelling structure in TV and on film versus its implementation in video games, amidst Valve honcho Gabe Newell and Abrams’ geek flexing, the pair dropped a double whammy.  Concluding that they wanted to see their discussions turn into collaboration, J.J. revealed the fact that he has a notion for a game in mind and he’s set on Valve realizing it.

On the other end of the spectrum, the two stated they would try to “figure out” how to make the award winning Half-Life and Portal franchises into feature-length films.

The details hit a brick wall past that.  Two veritable rockstars of their respective mediums, a J.J./Gaben collaboration seems to set the stage for exactly the kind of kick in the ass video game movies need.  And as for Abrams’ hand guiding a video game narrative?  You could really do worse than the man handpicked to continue motherfucking Star Wars.

Check out more of the Abrams/Newell discussion hereabouts.

Everything in the console space is coming from the PC now, and I think that we really need to see the same thing in terms of just general attitudes about platforms.  I would push [console manufacturers] very hard to stop thinking of themselves as being a platform for everything that already exists and start betting on the inventiveness and the benefits that you would get by embracing a more open approach to the internet and game delivery and game business models and things like that.

Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder and head honcho, speaking to Penny Arcade on all matters Valve and the gaming industry.  Newell comments that while his company may have next to no proficiency at it, Valve would deliver their own take on hardware if there was ever a stop-gate between innovative projects and delivering those projects to you, the consumer.