Guillermo Del Toro's high videogame IQ

Add me to the list of people very impressed by this Edge interview with "Hellboy," "Pan's Labrynth," and, soon, "The Hobbit" director Guillermo Del Toro in which he says "Shadow of the Colossus" and "Ico" are "the only two games [he] consider[s] masterpieces." Yes, I'm biased because I think "Shadow" (pictured below left) is the only game that's truly a masterpiece (I'm still trying to finish " Ico" in my spare time), but the important thing isn't (just) that he agrees with me. It's that here we have a major film director who can speak intelligently not only about videogames like "Shadow" and "Ico," "Grand Theft Auto IV," "Bioshock," and "Silent Hill," amongst others.

Given the number of people I know in Hollywood (directors, executives, producers, agents, you name it) who claim to be really interested in videogames but turn out to have heard more about them than actually played them, it's awesome to see someone who really gets videogames and appreciates them as culture. Del Toro is already a minor fanboy deity for his earlier work and is positioned to become an outright object of worship if "The Hobbit" turns out to be good, but his genuine love for videogames is yet another leg up in geek culture standing.

Of course, we have to take a tiny point away for his claim that Konami's lame "Hellboy: the Science of Evil" is "very entertaining" and that he's "very happy" with it (for a different take, see our review). Of course, it's obviously his job to say nice things about a game based on his movie and at least he admits that "it wasn't a high-end, expensive game," which is about as negative as someone can get in an interview like that.

He's pretty cagey about any "Hobbit" games, saying only "I was very impressed with the way the 'Lord of the Rings' were developed. They're very high quality in many aspects and - who knows? - maybe we can do something like that with 'The Hobbit.'" But based on this interview, I think it's safe to assume there an ambitious "Hobbit" game (or two) in the works to go with the movies, which are tentatively scheduled to come out in 2011 and 2012.