Category Archives: Variety (Print)

Women’s Impact Report: Jade Raymond: From ‘Creed’ to control

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Four years ago, Jade Raymond was a new employee at Ubisoft producing a new game the gaming world hadn’t heard of. That title — “Assassin’s Creed” — turned into the publisher’s biggest franchise. And her oversight of it resulted in Raymond being tapped to run the company’s new Toronto studio — a heavily financed unit that will be responsible for some of Ubisoft’s biggest titles in the years to come.

She initially turned down the promotion. Approached by the company as she was about to go on maternity leave, Raymond was still enjoying her job as executive producer of the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise. It meant supervising not just the game but brand-related projects including books, comics, a Web film series and more. And that work had resulted in worldwide sales of 9 million copies of the $60 game. She was doing similar work on other unannounced projects for the company in Montreal as well.

Read more at Daily Variety

Women’s Impact Report: Darla K. Anderson: Made big play with ‘Toy’

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When you’ve produced the biggest-grossing film of 2010 to date, you earn a little R&R.

Darla K. Anderson chose to take that in Kauai, her favorite of the Hawaiian isles, after “Toy Story 3,” which has grossed north of $1 billion worldwide. Batteries recharged, she’s now deciding what her next project will be at Pixar — and toward the top of that list is sweet revenge.

Read more at Daily Variety

Anthony Zuiker merges worlds

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Anthony Zuiker is introducing two of his children to each other.

The creator and executive producer of “CSI” plans to incorporate the villain from his “Level 26” book series into a special episode of “CSI” — the first step in a cross-platform experiment that brings the producer’s interests closer together.

Read more at Daily Variety

3D gaming won’t hit stores until 2011

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Despite indications it was right around the corner, 3D handheld gaming won’t hit store shelves until next year.

Nintendo announced Wednesday that its 3DS portable system, which lets owners play videogames in stereoscopic 3D without the need for special glasses, will go on sale in Japan next February — and will hit U.S. and European stores in March.

Read more at Daily Variety

4chan hacks MPAA, RIAA websites

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Frequenters of infamous U.S.-based website 4chan.org have declared war on Hollywood.

Its users led the charge in a distributed denial of service attack on the MPAA and RIAA websites Monday — blocking their pages for hours.

The move, say the anonymous attackers, was in retaliation to action the orgs have taken to squash filesharing sites such as Pirate Bay.

Read more in Daily Variety

Showbiz calls for end to vidgame ban

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A slew of entertainment industry orgs have joined together to file a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the vidgame biz’s efforts to overturn California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent vidgames to minors.

The biz’s concern is that the law restricting the sale of vidgames because of their content could have far-reaching First Amendment implications. The issue at stake in the challenge to the law isn’t whether publishers can make violent games, but whether states can impose sales restrictions on those titles — effectively declaring them to be on the same level as pornography and therefore able to legally limit their sale to adults.

Read more at Daily Variety

Review: Halo: Reach

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Prequels rarely resonate with audiences – regardless of the medium. So when Bungie Studios decided to make its last “Halo” game a prequel, there was some cause for concern.

Thankfully, those fears were misplaced. While the final chapter of “Halo: Reach” is something well known to any fan of the franchise, the game itself is perhaps the best in “Halo’s” nine-year history. And it’s a fitting sendoff for the developer, who is responsible for creating and growing one of the biggest series in the video game industry.

Read more at Daily Variety

Duke Nukem game for a comeback

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It took nearly five years for James Cameron to bring “Avatar” to the big screen — but the Na’Vi have nothing on “Duke Nukem Forever.”

First announced in 1997, this videogame — featuring one of gaming’s best known characters — has been re-thought, re-booted and presumed dead multiple times. On Friday, Take-Two Interactive Software pulled off one of the gaming world’s biggest surprises, not only announcing a firm release date and expanded platform footprint — it will ship in 2011 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 — but letting stunned gamers play it for the first time at last weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, a fan-centric gaming event held in Seattle.

Read more at Daily Variety

Apple TV moves from download to streaming

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Apple is wading into the stream. The company’s much-anticipated overhaul of its Apple TV service eschews the download-to-own model in favor of an HD Web streaming rental biz.

Apple’s plan to make movies available day and date with DVD for a $4.99 rental is in keeping with the film biz’s piracy-combatting push to make titles available for easy legal downloads through a host of platforms, from Apple’s iTunes to Netflix (which Apple TV will support); Amazon, Hulu and Blockbuster; the major videogame consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo; and, soon, YouTube.

Read more at Daily Variety

Apple enters rental biz

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Apple has made it official: It will soon offer 99 cent TV show rentals as part of the launch of an extensive revision of its Apple TV service.

Apple said it would offer streaming rentals of skeins from Fox, ABC, ABC Family, Disney Channel and BBC America on a rental basis. Users are able to watch the show for 30 days from the moment the episode is rented, and once it starts playing users have 48 hours to finish watching it.

Read more at Variety.com