Besides blasting Sony’s lack of disclosure about the PSP last week, Atari CEO Bruno Bonnell disclosed a little something of his own. Speaking at the Piper Jaffray consumer conference in New York City, the outspoken Bonnell reportedly said that his company was planning two sequels to last year’s Enter the Matrix.
Bonnell said that the second game was being developed for the current crop of consoles and that the third game would likely be released for next-gen machines. However, he did not go into development specifics, omitting any mention of Enter the Matrix studio Shiny.
Atari representatives contacted by GameSpot confirmed Bonnell’s statements but would not divulge any other details about the games.
Ironically, Bonnell’s revelations contradict recent statements he gave to Reuters, when he was quoted as saying that there was no point in doing a licensed game unless it was released at the same time as its film source and featured the film’s stars. “It is not a given that a great action movie turns into a great interactive game,” he said.
While Enter the Matrix was one of 2003’s best-selling games, it received universally ho-hum reviews. Since its release, the Matrix brand has suffered something of a backlash, thanks to the middling reception of the film The Matrix Reloaded and widespread dissatisfaction with its sequel, The Matrix Revolutions.
Anti-Matrix franchise sentiment is also blamed for Ubisoft’s decision not to publish the Matrix Online, a PC massively multiplayer role-playing game set in the Matrix itself. (Sega will now distribute the game.) The backlash is also cited as a reason for the new policy by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the game arm of Matrix movie studio Warner Bros., to peg game royalties to aggregate review scores.
By Tor Thorsen — GameSpot
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/0…ws_6100738.html
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