"Master of horror", Clive Barker, showed his latest piece of creative output, the Jericho videogame, at the second annual Hollywood & Games Summit in Hollywood this week, describing it thus:



We can just hear the ESRB and BBFC warming up their respective "Adults Only" and "Unrated" auto-stampers. 'Gory'? That's a word only allowed in films such as the Hostel series (or maybe 'classics' such as Saving Private Ryan) - certainly not in videogames, someone should tell Barker immediately.

"Maybe if games hadn't existed, I would have said, 'Make it a movie'. But I much prefer the idea of having 20 hours to play this world, to enter this labyrinth."

Barker pressed on with his defence of videogames, even calling up the great chimera of 'art' as he railed against movie critic Roger Ebert's assertion that games could never be more than 'craft'.

“That’s bullshit. This is a medium that’s barely 2 decades old, and he (Ebert) is saying oh, there’s no 'War And Peace' yet – of course there isn’t! We can debate what art is, we can debate it forever. But if the experience moves you, some way or another, even if it just moves your bowels, I think it’s worthy of some serious study... Games mean something to a lot of people. Games aren’t about reviewers, they’re about players."

This, apparently was merely Barker's warm-up, when running hot he appears to have forgotten the current order of the 'industry' - "If possible, say nothing. If pushed, keep it bland".

The concept of Jericho? is that there’s this evil f*ck that lives in the Sahara... [the plot involves] an assassination attempt upon a creature that gives the devil the shivers.”

“It would make a f*cking terrible novel. It really would, it doesn’t work! It screams out to be something other. Maybe if games hadn’t existed, I would’ve made it a movie. But I much prefer the idea of having twenty hours to play this world, to enter this labyrinth than the two hours or the way movies are going now. I don’t know what it is with people, my bum gets sore! I like pirates and all, but jeez!"

Barker - who is rapidly becoming SPOnG's 'Man of the Year' lashed out at the direction in which games are apparently going. We can only imagine that sound of PR and marketing people, project managers, CEOs and 'design consultants' fainting dead away as Clive launched the following into the crowd:

Now we really are looking forward to Electronic Arts' Jericho...


^{Source: Gamasutra}