James Patterson's New Gig - Casual Gaming With 'Women's Murder Club'

Readers who love getting a hold of the latest James Patterson book, or who are enthralled with his new ABC series based on his “Women’s Murder Club” will be pleased to know that a casual game from Oberon Media is currently in the works for this popular book title. In the game, players will be able to play as each of the founding members of the Women’s Murder Club: Lindsay Boxer, Cindy Thomas, Claire Washburn and Jill Bernhardt and will be able to use each woman’s expertise to uncover clues to San Francisco’s grisly homicides.

Patterson’s reasoning for this is the multitude of women (specifically speaking) who do not like to play shoot em up style games and are more into the cerebral side of solving a mystery or catching the bad guy:

“… it strikes me that the video game area is an incredibly lucrative niche market,” he explains, “one populated by a small number of boys — and grownup boys — who like to shoot things and spend a lot of money. But that excludes most of the universe. What I love about this project is the chance to widen the boundaries of what people can do on the small screen, sort of like what the [Nintendo] Wii is accomplishing. We’re going to give people who don’t want to shoot things … who prefer to use their brains … a chance to solve a really good mystery. This will open up a whole new arena to a lot of people who don’t play games now. I believe that market is huge.”

His first game will be an adaptation of his six (soon to be seven) book series and is being created by Jane Jensen, the person behind the popular Gabriel Knight series from Sierra Online. Jane is the co-founder of Oberon Media, a 5-year-old casual game developer/publisher who has published a couple of Agatha Christie mystery titles along with a vast number of other causal games.

“We are sort of baby-stepping our way towards a full adventure game while still keeping the elements that I believe are really good about casual games,” she says, “meaning that it has to be immediately intuitive with no barriers for entry and it has to be immediately rewarding.”

Patterson explained that he thought that Oberon Media would be the perfect partner in crime, in that he believes that they will do quality work on a title he lends his monkier to:

“Look at the book business,” he says. “The audience is 70-something-percent female. My readers are 70-something-percent female. And the majority of people who play casual games is the same. So I think the market for what we’re doing — games that are more sensitive and are centered on character, not shooting — will be monstrous. I have a huge audience … which is something ABC discovered when ‘Women’s Murder Club’ debuted and it was their biggest premiere on a Friday night in four years.”

Patterson quickly lets the public know that this has nothing - I repeat- NOTHING to do with money, because as he states so eloquently, he had loads of it:

“Look -This is very exciting. It’s not the money; I can’t spend all the money I have. But I look at the game and I think about the fact that the majority of people are excluded from games like these, and I go ‘Wow! Big, big opportunity!’ “

Either way you look at this, it is just more money in the bank for Patterson, and another thing to get his fans all atwitter about. We will keep you posted as more news regarding Women’s Murder Club surfaces.

Read the full article from The Hollywood Reporter here.

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