Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Pegg says: ZOMBIES DON"T RUN

I see a Mister S. Pegg is weighing in on Jayne's side of the debate over at the Guardian blog: Simon Pegg argues for a return to traditional zombie values

"...the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable."

I still think it's (dead) horses for courses myself, but I look forward to Gordon Brown picking a side.

Anyone playing Fable II? Rather enjoying it myself (my character's a foxy gunslinging chick who seems to live almost entirely on celery), and there's an interesting interview with game creator Peter Molyneux over at Gamasutra,which includes a bit about the use of script editors to refine the storyline (about page three, I think).

"We had a real problem, because we wanted to tell this story that you would remember. Normally, when we did Fable I, for example, the story actually didn't come together till the last three months, because you didn't have the regions. And you had to have the regions to have the voice stuff in.

And this was our problem. If we were to tell a truly great story we need to get script writers and directors, and gosh knows, and actors involved way before our world was even started.

So we did something which I think you are going to see more of, in this industry, called staging. What we did: We wrote the story. We got a script writer in. He wrote the script to the story."


Full Peter Molyneux interview


12 comments:

Tim F said...

Great Pegg moment of self-awareness:

"I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist..."

Jayne said...

Whoop! Me and Pegg are like that *crosses fingers*

BlackLOG said...

If Mr Brown does happen to pop in for the debate please, please please, shoot him with a silver bullet, put a stake through the place his heart should be, cut off his head and then burn him. He's a slippery sod and will probably change allegiance from Werewolf, to Zombie to Vampire and back again, depending how the debate is going. If all that fails show him some gold and see if you can embarrass him to death.

I Hope the secret service don't read your Blog, it will be off to the tower for me if they do. I wonder if they have internet access.....

llewtrah said...

What about zombie athletes, can't they run? Or at least do a 100 metres "fast lurch"?

kaiki said...

i loved this article, because the shambolic, bovine zombies of resident evil can still instill in me the FEAR.
*geek watch*
james, a friend and i are having a geek-off...he has put me on to alien loves predator(http://alienlovespredator.com/?id=2) and i've been trying to put him onto your toy-fu but the linky won't clicky properly.
any ideas ? i really want him to see it....

James Henry said...

Hmm, looks like I've missed a payment or summat, am chasing it up with my web guru as we speak...

kaiki said...

thanks james - have discovered it can be reached via the internet archive...they have a thing called the wayback machine which lets you see old versions of websites which is really handy if a website has disappeared - so if anyone else is looking to admire your work we found a link;
http://www.james-henry.co.uk/toy-fu/

hope this helps!

James Henry said...

Oh cool, thanks, have ameded HTML.

Oli said...

My Fable 2 character's... hmm... a foxy gunslinger who seems to enjoy living entirely on celery. I swear I'm not stalking you.

Anonymous said...

Fable 2 is great but I've been healing my character after battles with various pies and now he looks like John Prescott in a frock coat.
Alex

Anonymous said...

What d'you think of Brooker's reply to Pegg in the Guardian, James?

James Henry said...

Oh yeah, I meant to link that - I thought he made some excellent points. Actually, I thought he made better points that SP, although that's because I'm quite fond of running zombies. Ultimately, I'm just happy to have really long involved discussions about zombies taking place in otherwise fairly sensible broadsheets. It makes me feel like My Time Has Come.

(not that I could write a script about zombies now, I'm pretty sure they need to be left alone for a few years)