The 2008 ScreenBurn Festival
March 7 - 11, 2008
Austin, Texas

If you have not bought your Nintendo console and have plans to do so this holiday season, you better get to the retail store sooner than later. An article on Gamespot.com reveals the stats on Nintendo holiday games sales in the United States “for the “Black Friday” week of November 18-24. The seven-day period was Nintendo’s best ever in the US, with over 1.03 million systems sold in the 50 states. Of those, 350,000 were $249 Wiis, and 653,000 were $129 DSes. The latter figure eclipsed the record set in 2005, when over 600,000 Game Boy Advances were sold during Thanksgiving Week.” As Wii’s are well received by the entire family to play, the Wii console has turned into a hot commodity that’s in more demand than anticipated. Reggie Fils-Aime, the President of Nintendo of America laments, “At this point, we are literally trying to catch up with demand. [Prospective Wii buyers] aren’t going to sleep outside of a store overnight or visit a retailer five or six times. It is literally a missed opportunity.” Don’t miss your chance to break out the new Wii with the family over the holidays.

Looks like the Discovery Channel’s recent interest in gaming has to do with a lot more than just programming: The company has announced that it will partner with Activision, Inc. to produce video games based on its most popular nature shows, reports Reuters. Addictive dynastic-rodent reality show Meerkat Manor is the first show slated to be immortalized in game, with other nature shows from Discovery’s Animal Planet channel to follow. “We are really trying to get away from being a cable company and into being a content company,” explained Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav. The Discovery games series will be aimed at the ever-expanding casual gaming demographic. The prospect of these glossy nature-themed games should thrill Serious Games Initiative co-founder Ben Sawyer, who recently railed against the glut of “crappy” video games for kids in a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit.

Image of Meerkat Manor courtesy of the Discovery Channel.

Today, world leaders convene in Annapolis, Maryland to discuss the peacemaking process in the Middle East–namely, the establishment of a Palestinian state and other issues facing the conflicted region. Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv-based Peres Center for Peace is hoping that everyday Israelis and Palestinians can approach the contentious dialogue in a new way–via video game. GamePolitics.com reports that the Peres Center has given away 100,000 free copies of PeaceMaker–an award-winning simulation of the conflict in the Middle East–to people living in Israel and the Palestinian territories, just in time for the Annapolis summit. According to the PeaceMaker site, the game “challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed, [and] experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East or the agony of plunging the region into disaster.” Players may choose to play as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, consulting advisors and following real-life events to work towards a two-state resolution. But can even the best simulation do justice to such a harrowing situation? The Peres Center is hoping the game will give Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to “understand limitations of each one’s president and leader, and as well the limitation of the other side.” Only time will tell if PeaceMaker turns out to be the kind of resolution breakthrough its designers intend it to be .

Kudos to the Discovery Channel on their new series “Rise of the Videogame”, which is getting generally high marks from the online press. Writes John Walker on his blog Rock Paper Shotgun, “Unlike so many programmes about videogames, Rise Of demonstrates a depth of research and work that lifts it above the usually banal, patronising rubbish that television normally produces on the subject. It interviews all the right people, knows to show clips of all the right games, and makes the assumption that you’ve already a basic knowledge of the subject. The first episode (of five hour-long documentaries) explores the birth of videogaming, and takes the Cold War as its allegorical guide. After discussing oscilloscopes being hacked to play a tennis game, it moves on to the enigmatic Steve Russell talking about how he created Spacewar!, comparing the original nature of gaming (shooting things, missiles, explosions, etc) with the American culture of fear surrounding the tensions with the USSR; how it was, “Born out of Cold War anxiety and nurtured in the era of counterculture.” The series continues on Wednesday nights through December 19.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the gamers young and old who are at home enjoying the holiday and getting extra game time in. Games.net has put together a top ten list of games based on Thanksgiving Day Traditions that will help you get through the holiday. As you must be awaiting, the busiest shopping day of the year is tomorrow, and I know you’re anticipating new releases for the holidays. Here’s what Gamasutra has announced for release this holiday week. Don’t let the tryptophan get you or your relatives’ game down today.

Harmonix and MTV Games’ much-anticipated Rock Band went on sale yesterday to great fanfare from the ‘nets. Though there’s no official word yet on exactly how many copies of Rock Band have sold so far, it looks like it might give Guitar Hero III a run for its money in terms of astronomical first-week sales, judging from frenzied reports of Rock Band shortages in stores. Rock Band (and original Guitar Hero) developer Harmonix, of course, was founded by two MIT students who wanted to make the experience of performing music more accessible to those without musical training. “This was a dream game for us,” reveals Harmonix founder Alex Rigopulos in a recent Team XBox interview. “I mean, we’re a company that’s populated by rock musicians, and this was a game we had been dreaming of for years.” With true-to-life instrument-shaped peripherals and the largest playlist of any music game (plus more songs available for download), Rock Band seems like a sure bet for gathering ’round to shred off tryptophan-induced calories with love ones this holiday season. In fact, just try not to burn a calorie merely by watching some of the promo videos on RB’s official site. (We like the Death Proof-inspired take on Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”.)

Two months after its release, Halo 3 shows no signs of halting its inexorable march toward total media domination. Sure, it’s old news that Halo sold two and a half million copies within a day of its September 25th release and totally pwned Hollywood in October, but now Halo is a bona fide New York Times Bestseller as well, reports Gamasutra. Halo: Contact Harvest, a book chronicling Halo’s backstory and written by Halo creator/lead writer Joseph Staten, debuted at #3 on the Times list. Meanwhile, Halo–which has long been the province of hardcore gamers–has seen an unexpected spike in popularity among the casual gaming set. But really, given Halo’s massive multi-tier marketing campaign, wouldn’t it be more surprising if it wasn’t dominating pop culture right now?

Who says that video games don’t deal with real life issues? Witness the new title Blacksite: Area 51, which seems to be not-too-subtle dig at the ongoing Iraqi conflict. As noted in a review by Clive Thompson on Wired, “In his game, the soldiers are persistently cynical about their commanding officers, and wearily accept the grim ironies of modern statecraft. They learn, for example, that the gibbering alien enemies we’re fighting in the game were armed, trained and basically created by the United States — a straightforward allusion to how America, by sponsoring Afghan mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in the ’80s, essentially trained the same people who attack us today. At one point, after finishing off an opponent, one of my teammates cocks his gun and shouts, ‘Kick-ass American engineering, baby!’ — at which point another soldier replies, ‘I hate to break it to you, but those are mass-produced in China.’” Blacksite was designed by Austin-based game designer Harvey Smith, who spoke about “The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology” at ScreenBurn 2007.

Friday, November 16 is the $350 registration deadline for the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival. In other words, if you register today, you will save $100 on the walkup fees. Purchasing a SXSW Interactive, Gold or Platinum badge allows you to attend all the way great ScreenBurn panel content for 2008. This badge also allows you to attend the ScreenBurn Arcade, the Interactive / Film Trade Show & Exhibition, as well as the dozens of incredible evening activities. Wow, so much cool stuff at such a great price!

Back in February, Dan Aykroyd confirmed that Universal bought the rights for a Ghostbusters game, reveals Wired’s Game|Life, and Game Informer Magazine’s December issue will sift through all the details of the upcoming game in a Ghostbusters cover story. The venerable funnyman triptych of Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Harold Ramis will reunite for the game’s scriptwriting duties, and Aykroyd even said he would be “performing and doing some motion capture”. So the Ghostbusters will literally be writing and starring in their own…video game. Reflecting on last month’s hype about Jack Black starring in Double Fine’s Brutal Legend, we smell a reverse trend: Sure, movie stars will continue to appear in videogame-based movies (of varying degrees of watchability, natch). But as the gaming industry continues to batter box office numbers, we think more stars will strike (possibly more lucrative?) deals with video game developers to appear on a console near you.