Hollywood and games industry blending, says Zucker

With the newest generation of gaming systems, the film and games industry will blend more often, with each drawing from the other.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Midway's CEO David Zucker noted that the company worked hard to bring the cinematic style and elements of John Woo's Hong Kong action films into the game world with Stranglehold.

Zucker was pleased that the Stranglehold demo, recently released on Xbox Live, was well-received by gamers.

"I think from a pure action standpoint, there's really nothing like it," he said. "[We] can see the sessions, and [as of the end of August] it's tracking towards 1 million downloads, which would be very big."

The Stranglehold demo seems to have more replay value than most, as evidenced by the amount of time that people are spending with it.

"But you can look at some of the times and actually for people from New Zealand, the average session is over 70 minutes - maybe they're exploding everything in the environment," Zucker offered.

He thinks that the blending of the film and game industries will continue in the future.

"With Wheelman, we've got Vin Diesel, and there we're looking at the cinematic, thinking about the best car chase movies in the history of film. And that's what we're drawing from, that's the feeling we want you to get when you're playing Wheelman, that's what we're aiming for," Zucker explained.

The entire interview with David Zucker can be viewed here.