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Star Trek: Into Darkness director JJ Abrams has attacked Namco Bandai’s tie-in Star Trek: The Video Game, claiming that the game “arguably hurt” the success of the movie.
Speaking to GamerHub, Abrams explained that the game “was obviously a big disappointment”, and that he walked away from the project early on after realising “that it was not going in a place where we were going to get what we wanted…
“To me, the video game could have been something that actually really benefited the series and was an exciting, fun game with great gameplay,” he said, “and instead it was not and it was something that I think, for me emotionally it hurt, because we were working our asses off making the movie and then this game came out and it got, this isn’t even my opinion, it got universally panned and I think it was something without question that didn’t help the movie and arguably hurt it.”
Abrams believes that movie tie-ins shouldn’t feel like “a marketing decision made by a room full of people that wanted to capitalise on a title. That’s no way to make a game and no way to make a movie,” he says.
Abrams is currently working with Valve on Portal and Half-Life movie projects, which are being designed “from the ground up” as products independent of the games.
“The dream is – and we’re working with Valve right now on a couple of projects – is to say, okay, despite its existence, despite it pre-existing as a game, despite its existence as a movie, what makes this great, and starting from scratch, from a place of let’s make this from the ground up regardless of what’s come before.”
Star Trek: The Video Game launched in April, two weeks before Star Trek: Into Darkness hit cinemas.
Like Abrams, we weren’t fans of the game either, but some people were, leading Matt to track them down.
Source: youtube.com (GamerHubVideos)
