The film takes place in a future where Earth is a polluted Crapsack World, though the story itself unfolds on Pandora, a large moon of the planet Polyphemus in the Alpha Centauri A system. “’s like a god.Avatar is a 2009 Science Fiction film directed by James Cameron. In summer 2009, with the release date approaching, animation director Richie Baneham - celebrated for engineering the breakthrough animation of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings - spent a day with the Ubisoft dev team to make sure everything was right. In the two years that followed, key members of the Ubisoft team had frequent meetings in Los Angeles, and Cameron and Landau turned up in Montreal from time to time as well.
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The resulting compendium provides a detailed guide to every creature on Pandora and every RDA war machine, as well as such critical info as the cost of a phone call to Earth ($78,000 per minute). Cameron and Landau liked it so much they hired a team of writers to put it together. In a presentation at the Santa Monica headquarters of Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment several months later, the Ubisoft team suggested they create a “Pandorapedia” - an in-game resource fans could use to delve deeper into the world of Pandora. They focused on such only-in-Pandora creatures as the Banshee, a giant pterodactyl harnessed by the Na’vi as a sort of living F-16: How does it fly? What does it sound like? “All the things we need to nail in order to deliver the same reptile,” says Naud.
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Soon after the movie got an official green light from Fox in January 2007, the leaders of the Ubisoft dev team flew to Hollywood to meet with the people in charge of sound and animation. Security was so high that employees in “the bunker,” as the Avatar zone was called, worked on computers with no internet connections and no USB ports.īut if their contact with the outside world was limited, they did have a direct pipeline to the film crew in Los Angeles. Or you can join the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous population, and try to resist the RDA’s exploitation.Īs Mallat puts it, “We’re asking the player, ‘What is worth fighting for?’ That’s the meaning of the movie - but only in the game will you be able to answer it your way and live with the consequences.”įor the better part of three years, Dodens and his largely French Canadian dev team spent most of their days behind double sets of locked doors in a remote corner of Ubisoft’s mazelike Montreal offices.
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As a human “ merc” on Pandora, you can suit up in body armor and help the Resources Development Administration in its quest for “unobtanium,” the superscarce mineral that goes for $20 million an ounce Earthside. Our only guideline was, ‘Don’t contradict what we’re doing,’ and other than that, go at it.”īefore that, though, you get to play both sides.
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“We exposed people to the breadth and scope of our movie,” says Landau, “and we challenged them to take advantage of that in their own arena. The desire to avoid that fate was one reason Cameron was auditioning game developers three years ago. That’s assuming the game doesn’t suffer the fate of most movie-game tie-ins - instant dismissal by the fanboys.