"EVERYBODY LOVES SWORDS":

A Kurosawa Epic Turned Video Game (ROBERT LEVINE, 3/14/04, NY Times)

In the case of Akira Kurosawa's three-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, "Seven Samurai,"...a game isn't exactly obvious. Released in 1954, the film has a stately pace and an artful composition that would seem ill suited to a medium associated with twitchy action and lightning-quick shifts in perspective. But Seven Samurai 20XX, a PlayStation 2 game made with the cooperation of the filmmaker's son, Hisao, will be released March 23, which would have been his 94th birthday.

The project grew out of a conversation between the younger Kurosawa, who runs a foundation dedicated to preserving his father's work, and his friend Hajime Satomi, president and chairman of the Sammy Corporation, a Japanese game manufacturer. The company was intrigued by the plot of "Seven Samurai," about a group of warriors who agree to defend a small village from roving marauders. But the film's 16th-century feudal setting limited the graphic possibilities, and Sammy executives feared that Kurosawa's extended buildup to the action would strain 18-to-24-year-old attention spans. "We had to put more action in there," said Brian Glazebrook, the game's producer.

Most of that action consists of hacking up enemies with a sword, and game designers added fighting to the beginning of the story, when players must recruit six more samurai. The company also shifted the setting from medieval Japan to a futuristic landscape filled with a dizzying variety of robotic-looking foes designed by the French comics artist Jean Giraud, who works under the name Moebius.

As long as they don't make Rashomon a role play game...

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 14, 2004 9:19 AM