South Park Cheesy Poofs Become Real

Comedy Central will be celebrating 15 seasons of South Park with a partnership with Frito-Lay to produce 1.5 million packages of Cheesy Poofs to be sold in Walmart stores and given away free at Comic-Con. Comedy Central owes a lot to the show and they’re quick to play up the connection viewers have with the show.

“Right now is ‘South Park’s’ moment in the sun,” said Michele Ganeless, president of Comedy Central in New York, part of the MTV Networks unit of Viacom. “Fifteen years of a success on television, let alone on cable, is an achievement.”

“It’s fair to say the viewers of programs on Comedy Central overlap well with consumers of our products,” added Chris Kuechenmeister, a spokesman at Frito-Lay. “This is the first time we’ve moved into something like this,” he added. “It seemed like a nice thing to try.”

Source: New York Times

Bastion Set For Launch

One of the more anticipated downloadable titles of the year, Bastion is varied and colorful. Find out more from the mysterious narrator in this trailer.

Alienware Enters Area 52

Alienware recently hosted a 3D Projection Mapping Event in Melbourne, Australia. This cool event ended up fusing pyrotechnics and real life actors with projects from all angles onto an object: a trailer residence.

Arcade Classic Reborn For New Comedy 30 Minutes Or Less

Available to play from Facebook and at an official URL destination, Vito’s Pizza Guy is a mini-game experience reminiscent of the classic arcade console game Paperboy built to promote the 30 Minutes or Less starring latest Jesse Eisenberg and Danny McBride. Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), the story of the bank heist buddy movie involves some guys enlisting a pizza delivery boy to become a bank robber. Vito’s Pizza Guy uses the familiar WASD keyboard combination of Paperboy allowing the user to control a car driving down a suburban street and toss pizzas onto porches as they pass by. Avoid collision with objects in the road and try not to break any windows in order to post your high score and share with friends. Also of note, the film has launched its own Tumblr with plenty of clips and ready made animations for the blogosphere and beyond to share.

 

The Dark Tower Gunned Down By Comcast

The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s long running fantasy series that has long been eyed by media groups for adaptations, though all were reluctant given its length and breadth. Universal recently decided on an ambitious plan that includes three movies and a television series, though the new owners at Comcast apparently balked at the deal and its recent delay will now become permanent.

Big talent was signed on – Ron Howard was expected to direct and produce the first movie with Akiva Goldsmanexpected to produce and write and Brian Grazer also on as a producer with Javier Bardem brought on to star. Instead, the adaptation goes on the scrapheap along with Guillermo del Toro’s $150 million adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness.

Source: Reuters.com

BrandPort And GamerDNA Media Become Live Gamer Media

Live Gamer has announced that they are acquiring ad network gamerDNA Media and engagement advertising platform BrandPort. The two will be combined to form Live Gamer Media, which will offer advertisers a singular solution for reaching hardcore, social and casual gamers on several levels of engagement.

Launching Live Gamer Media through the acquisitions of two impressive companies – gamerDNA and BrandPort – offers advertisers a one-stop partner for connecting with gamers in a whole new way, said Andrew Schneider, president and co-founder of Live Gamer, We’ve brought together the reach of display with the innovation and high-engagement levels of virtual goods incentive video – both gamers and advertisers win.

Charitable Social Companies Team Up

Virtue announced today that they have acquired the San Francisco-based GamesThatGive. The two companies share a focus on charitable activities through branded-gaming experiences.

A key goal for Vitrue this year is to provide our customers with the most robust and innovative platform for social marketing, whether through partnerships, integrations, or new acquisitions, said Reggie Bradford, founder and CEO of Vitrue. We’ve seen great results from incorporating elements of charity and gaming into brands social campaigns. With this acquisition of GamesThatGive, a company that has developed a successful, smart platform, we are now offering both the gaming and charitable elements through our platform to continue to help brands reach and engage with their target audiences in new and effective ways.

Virtue will now have extra gaming functionality in their leading social marketing platform Virtue SRM. Brands can now create their own fully custom games that add extra touch points and build goodwill while supporting worthy causes.

Charitable game mechanics are a new way to motivate Facebook fans to play while giving brands a truly unique and charitable manner to engage with their fan base, said Adam Archer, co-founder and CEO of GamesThatGive. Our gaming solutions allow brands to drive fans to their Facebook pages and increase user retention and brand affinity. We give brands a platform to showcase and raise funds for their charities through engaging gaming experiences for Facebook fans.

Virtue has worked with a number of clients that cross-over with GamesThatGive including Pepsi and Domino s. GamesThatGive has an impressive hit-list of clients that include MasterCard, Dial Soap, Quaker, Dockers, UNICEF and Propel.

Domino s puts a priority on reaching and building real social relationships with the millions of people that are on Facebook and other emerging social networks, said Russell Weiner, Chief Marketing Officer, Domino s Pizza, a Vitrue and GamesThatGive client. But there are also millions of people playing games for free online every day and we ll certainly jump at the chance to put our product in front of them and demonstrate our commitment to the community at the same time. As a partner of both Vitrue and GamesThatGive, we can easily manage our entire social presence in one place, and not only acquire and engage with fans in ongoing, innovative ways but also tie-in our charitable foundations in a seamless manner.

It s been a great experience working with GamesThatGive, explains Chris Jackman, Senior Manager of Dockers Digital Marketing. Not only were we able to support a charitable organization of our choosing, but it helped us lower our fan acquisition costs. Additionally, total traffic to our Facebook page increased helped by the fact that 65 percent of the game visits are from returning players. We’ve also found that the players tend to be engaged with our page posting and commenting no doubt spurred by the fact that the players average over 40 minutes per visit.

Angry Birds Developer Sees ‘Film Potential’

Angry Birds has become embedded in our popular culture, featured in ads for everything from for movies like Rio to phones from Sprint. Rovio has their own ambitions plans for the franchise outside of what other might choose to include them with in their commercials.

“How I see our whole brand, our whole Angry Birds franchise – I definitely see the film potential as a long-term commitment,” said Rovio VP of franchise development Ville Heijari.”Not just the one-off flick that happened, but to really flesh out the world, build the characters, make it really engaging.”

“We’re not trying to imitate or copycat anybody, but if you think of examples of what has been done before, if you think of something like Ice Age: there’s three movies, pretty popular – that sort of thing. Really breathe a lot of life into and flesh out the world of Angry Birds. We really genuinely have a lot of storytelling opportunities there. It’s not all about birds slingshotting themselves!  There’s a lot of stuff going around the characters.”

Heijari confirmed that the ball has already gotten rolling on a feature film, saying “If we started production today, the earliest date would be in 2014 maybe. When we’re talking about a full feature film, that’s really impossible to comment at the moment because that’s really in the planning stages. Even when we eventually might announce that we’ve started the production of the movie, we still might end up releasing animations – an animated series first, just because the production cycles are so much shorter.

Source: Eurogamer

Uncharted Director ‘Going Back To The Video Game’

Neil Burger was recently confirmed as the new director of the Uncharted film adaptation, replacing David O. Russell. While Russell had a lot of ideas for the movie (many of which differed from the canon of the game storyline), though Burger is looking for a fresh start.

I haven t seen his screenplay on it. Mainly we re beginning from scratch and going back to the videogame. Because there s a lot of cool stuff, actually, from the videogame. said Burger. It s really one of the most cinematic videogames, and one that has really developed characters. So, you know, there s a lot of cool, really intense things that, if they work for the film’s story, I want to use them.

Castle star Nathan Fillion is a sentimental favorite to get the role of Nathan Drake, and for what it is worth, Burger is aware of the support he has. I ve seen a little bit of that, yes. That was brought to my attention, said Burger. So, you know, I think he s a good actor. I think there s a lot of really good actors who don t even look like [Nathan Drake] who could play it! Where we are right now is that we re literally starting from scratch on the screenplay, and I think that once we finish it, then we ll go to actors and see who s available and who s right for the parts. Whenever that happens.

Source: craveonline.com