Activision’s Beenox Studio to Focus on More Original IPs

Following the raging success(?) of their Bee Movie Game, Beenox Studios - part of Activision- will be speeding up the production of original content. With its first title created from scratch being the aforementioned game, Beenox is currently working on the Wii version of Activision’s first James Bond game, which is expected to be released concurrently with the movie later this year. Tentatively slated for a November 2008 release, the working title of both the film and the game is Bond 22.

“Right now we’re working on a James Bond Wii title in conjunction with Treyarch (CoD3) and we’re rolling with it because we’re really good at what we’re doing and Activision doesn’t want to send their ports anywhere else,” said Thomas Wilson, creative director of Beenox. “One thing we want to make sure of if we’re making the Wii version is that we absolutely want the controls to be top notch. Although we don’t fully control the original development content because it’s in collaboration with Treyarch, that’s one thing that we can do – make sure we put out a strong Wii title. We’re almost ahead of the title that is being developed with Treyarch at the moment, so we’re saying that we’re ready and waiting for stuff. That’s the Beenox way of doing things, we don’t want to waste time, we want to be productive.”

Beenox has previously been responsible for porting the majority of of Activision titles such as Spider-Man and X-Men to multiple formats, the studio is now concentrating on original content but is still intent on successfully porting games for Activision.

“We have two types of teams – the conversion team, with the ability to convert titles and make good ports – and at the same time we have an original team developing original titles, and we’re talking about having multiple projects running at the same time,” said Wilson.

The Bee Movie Game came together in only 18 months, and the studio used all in-house technology instead of relying on any external middleware. Wilson’s team were also allowed a level of creative freedom that he believes proved to Activision that Beenox is more than just a “porting factory”.

“We had a lot of creative room and so we expect that creative room to be as big if not bigger on our next projects. Now that we’ve proven what we can do we expect Activision to understand where we want to go with a title and let us have fun with it”, said Wilson.

Fantastic. Good for them. Woo Hoo. They can do whatever they want, just as long as they do not sully Bond with another crap game like The World is Not Enough or From Russia with Love. It is high time 007 had another great game like Goldeneye and by-god Bond deserves it.

For more on this development, visit: GamesIndustry.biz