Previews

We've all heard the rumours and promises, but it's near enough to the release date of the highly anticipated Ghostbusters video game (June 19th) to put together a solid look at what we can expect, who's involved and what the story will be.

First off, you may have heard the game was being shipped around by Slovenien developer ZootFly in early 2006. Naughty ZootFly didn't actually own the rights, which belonged to Sony, and since Sony weren't budging, ZootFly ended up turning their game into something called 'TimeO' (which has since sunk into development hell - possibly due to Sony's overprotective lawyers). Despite their failure, several early game trailers (plus in-game footage) leaked onto the internet, generating a lot of buzz. Were the Ghostbusters coming back in video game form?

An early concept image that accompanied the Zootfly Ghostbusters game

A year or so later, in the spring of 2007, Sierra Entertainment (publishers of Half Life) and developer Terminal Reality (BloodRayne 1 & 2) got together with Sony to pitch their own Ghostbusters game. Whether or not ZootFly's earlier attempts gave them the idea or if it was just a coincidence isn't clear, but it's hard to argue that Sierra wasn't riding the wave of ZootFly's positively received early footage, which paved the way for discussions with Sony.

Sierra Entertainment later merged with Activision to form the company Activision Blizzard and on July 28th 2008, they announced that Ghostbusters (amongst other games) had been cut from their line-up of games in production. Luckily, Atari stepped up to the plate and with Sony the new duo soon announced they would be releasing the game on multiple platforms in June 2009, to coincide with the 25th Anniversary of the release of the original 1984 movie, and the Blu-ray releases of Ghostbusters 1 & 2 (which itself is 20 years old this year).

When someone asks you if there's a God Mode cheat, you say YES! Unless there isn't one, of course.

While we've been told that the game had been written by original writers/actors Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, the truth is that Aykroyd was approached with an early draft by John Zurr Platten (who helped write the "Chronicles of Riddick" game) and John Melchior. The four of them then traded ideas back and forth until they were all happy with the final game script. Says Aykroyd: "They came to me and these are guys (that) probably saw the second movie when they were in their late teens and grew up to be gamers and programmers and they loved the movie so much they wanted to make a video game out of it."

"We had to do all our own dialogue, retone it to bring it back to the tone of the first and second movie, and also there's a lot of new equipment introduced in the game." We'll get to the equipment in a moment because it'll make more sense to know the storyline first. The game is set in 1991 - two years after Ghostbusters II - with the Ghostbusters still regarded as heroes for saving New York from Vigo the Carpathian and his river of slime (as you do).