A Canadian development company has acquired exclusive rights to create a video game based on the works and likeness of Charlie Chaplin.A filmmaker and actor, he has written, directed and starred in dozens of films. and his character Trump is one of the most recognized comedy icons in the world. Chaplin is now revered by the film companies that once disrespected his work, and even old clips and entire films are finding his modern audience on YouTube.
news coming in a CBS report (opens in new tab) Quebec-based B Df’frent Games, along with Chaplin expert Yves Durand, successfully pitched the idea to the Chaplin family. The conditions the family wanted were “no violence, no sexism, no racism, genuine storytelling.” This sounds like they thought they were pitched this thing in the mid-1990s, but let me slide.
“One of the attractions of Chaplin is showing a Chaplin movie to a group of young people aged 10 to 15. Even today, you start to see people laughing,” says B’Df. ‘Frent Games co-founder Robert Young said. “The things he did, the things he did, the way he expressed himself, the way he moved still make people laugh today. They still get a kick out of it.
Hmm. The question of how exactly it translates into a video game has yet to be seen.Young sees every project as a video game with “social impact,” which Montreal’s “game Developed with Indie’s Asylum, which is a co-op.
“It took five years to talk to the family…and it was much more about aligning our values with the Chaplin family than negotiating royalties,” Young said. later noted that Chaplin’s films are only popular with older audiences, but noted that “more than 200 million people watch Chaplin’s films on YouTube annually, aged between 15 and 35.” I’m here.
Indie Asylum co-founder Christopher Chancey said, “No one has created a video game with intellectual property like this.
Unfortunately he is wrong about it. In 1988 he had the MS-DOS Charlie Chaplin game released by US Gold. it’s a weird little thing (opens in new tab), is almost a predecessor to things like the Lionhead movies. You played well-animated “scenes” as Chaplin in a Trump costume and edited them together into a film that audiences either agreed or disagreed with. But it’s a true antique. You can see it in action below.
anyway. Chancey believes the pandemic has created a desire for unconventional games. He adds that a potential Chaplin game could focus on the gap between rich and poor.
Oddly enough, old DOS games show that it’s not an impossible task. The hard part is capturing the essence of the man’s movements (he’s one of the greatest physical comedians of all time, after all) and ultimately building a game that’s actually funny no matter what it does.
Unfortunately, there is also bad news. In preparation for this article, I researched Indie Asylum and B Df’Frent. The former seems to be a fairly simple collection of smaller development studios. But for B Df’Frent, Official website (opens in new tab) I have this killer sentence in my site’s metacode:
“B Df’rent Games is a software publisher of Little Tramp adventure games for mobile devices. In the future, a series of NFTs based on the game’s IP will be available.”
So… yeah. Not that my hopes were high, but the intention here is to involve the likeness of such an iconic figure in a blockchain hoax rather than actually making a great game based on his work. Violence may be the last thing the Chaplin family should worry about.
