Whatcha Gonna Play? Ghostbusters (the Game)!

There is a pretty elaborate history to the game of Ghostbusters, and it won’t even be released until Q3 of this year. In January of 2007, leaked videos of gameplay for a rumored Ghostbusters game hit the net. While the trailer no longer exists on Youtube, the internet sure did go agog for it. Developers Zootfly came forward shortly thereafter and confirmed that though the game was in development, they sadly didn’t have the actual license for it.

While Zootfly didn’t own the rights, their internet footage created a huge buzz across the land. So once Vivendi had the rights and saw what happened, they knew the game was going to be successful, and got to work on their own game. Zootfly was out of the picture, but jump started the work to get the actual game into production.

And what a production it has become. Ghostbusters, which originally came out in 1984, has been consistently one of the funniest films of all time (in my opinion, anyway), and the highest grossing comedy for several years to come mainly because it had some of the funniest people alive (at the time) involved with its production. Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, and Rick Moranis wrote the film and Bill Murray came in to top off these heavy weights.

Which brings me, gleefully, to the production of the video game. Not only was Dan Akryod heavily involved in the writing of the game and creating original elements, he was also able to get almost all of the main players back into their iconographic roles. Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts and William Atherton (who played Walter Peck), are back to reprise their roles. Dan Akroyd is also going to be doing motion capture for the game, though it is unclear about the others. People who won’t be returning are Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver. The script itself is actually pretty large, and completely original.

In order to help roll out an already highly anticipated game, Sierra has assembled their own ECTO-1, the classic Ghostbusters car, to go on tour across the country and will have a playable portion of the game on hand for excited gamers. It is mostly making the rounds of car shows, but is going to be present for the entire Penny Arcade Expo.
Early impressions have marveled at the powerful engine behind the game, with the beautiful, fully rendered backgrounds, which are heavily destroyable and impressive NPC counts on the side walks of New York City.

Terminal Reality seems to have a very impressive, built-from-the-ground-up game on their hands, based solely on the technical aspects. Combine that with the heavy involvement of the original cast and creative team, we are looking at one hell of a highly anticipated game on our hands. The E3 trailer agrees:

Hopefully it will be more enjoyable than the confusing Nintendo game that tormented my brothers and I for several years. We were never able to beat it completely.