The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety

Changes at the top of Brash; Jumper sold 16,000 units

Exclusively in Daily Variety tomorrow... and online now for your reading pleasure: Just a year after launch, there's a shakeup at Brash Entertainment.

The Hollywood-based publisher that's using $400 million in private equity money to exclusively do games based on movie, TV and music licenses has lost its president Nicholas Longano (pictured right). A Brash rep confirmed that he has "exited" the company after I heard the news from several sources.

He wasn't officially fired, as far as I know, but it seems safe to assume you don't voluntarily leave a company you co-founded one year after it launched if everything's going swimmingly.

Longano, as most of you probably know, ran game advertising company Massive with partner Mitch Davis until they sold it to Microsoft. Davis remains in his post as CEO and is taking over the president responsibilities from Davis as well.

The two of them founded Brash with Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull, who tapped a lot of the same funding sources he got for Legendary to invest in Brash, and Atlanta businessman and Massive investor Bert Ellis.

Longano is still an investor, so he'll remain involved to the extent that his money talks.

Brash has certainly had problems in its first year in terms of gamers' perception. It's first two games, "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and "Jumper: Griffin's Story," were both developed on very short cycles in order to meet a movie release date and were critically bashed. People inside Brash admit that they didn't exactly put their best foot forward with those games.

But in the process of reporting this story I thought it would be interesting to find out how they did commercially, even if gamers didn't give 'em any respect. It turns out "Alvin" did OK, selling 281,000 units in the U.S. according to NPD. But "Jumper?" It has sold an astonishingly low 16,000 units since February. That's gotta hurt.

On Variety.com:
-Brash President Longano Exits
-"Jumper: Griffin's Story" review
-"Alvin and the Chipmunks" review
-Brash Entertainment launch story

Jumper: Griffin's Story review

In tomorrow's Daily Variety, Tom Chick reviews "Jumper: Griffin's Story," the second game from Hollywood publisher Brash Entertainment, and he's not too kind. Terms like "tedious," "dull," "bottom of the barrel" and "pointless" all pop up. Here's the first paragraph of Tom's review:

The tagline for "Jumper" boasts that "anywhere is possible." But gamers excited about that idea will be sorely disappointed by this uninspired, cheap-looking adaptation. Instead of giving players the power to teleport around the world, it shunts them through a series of tedious fisticuffs, one dull room at a time. Odds are slim that "Jumper: Griffin's Story" will generate even a fraction of the companion pic's opening weekend B.O. success.

And you can read the rest of it here.

Interestingly, there's no review yet on 1Up, GameSpot, or IGN. The only other review I can find, in fact, is at msxbox-world.com (never heard of it either) and they give it a 3.5. It seems like review copies didn't go out until a few days after the game was released, but given that it has now been a week since "Jumper" hit stores, it also seems like most videogame publications just aren't interested.

Looks like Brash is doing "Clash of the Titans"

MTV's Multi-Player blog went to a San Francisco event for the videogame press sponsored by Hollywood's resident videogame publisher Brash Entertainment and got one juicy detail -- well, more like a guess that I'm ready to call definitely true.

Brash had demo stations set up up for "Jumper," based on the Fox/Regency pic that comes out next week (MTV's verdict: "blurry textures, constantly hiccuping frame rate and low-polygon character models didn’t inspire much confidence in the final product"), this summer's "Space Chimps," and next year's "Saw."

But it also showed a trailer for a 2010 release, probably with the intention of demonstrating that its  slate consists of much more than games made in a year or less, like "Alvin and the Chipmunks," "Jumper," and "Space Chimps." Apparently it's a mythological game. Multi-Player guesses it's "Clash of the Titans." I would say that's definitely true, and not only by process of elimination (Multi-Player makes its guess because the only other likely license, "Jason and the Argonauts," is at Codemasters).

This is certainly the game Brash is working on because, as Variety has previously reported, Legendary Pictures is developing a remake of the cult classic "Clash of the Titans" movie. Brash is all about movie licenses and has a particularly tight relationship with Legendary since its co-founder, Thomas Tull, is chairman of Legendary. Plus I have heard talk about a project like this from several sources. Combine all that evidence and I'd call the conclusion that the game Brash was showing was "Clash of the Titans" a no-brainer.

(This event also explains why Brash went on the "announcement spree" I wrote about last week. They had to have something besides "Jumper" to show.)

Saw, Space Chimps... Brash goes on an announcement spree

Hollywood's resident video game publisher Brash Entertainment went on an announcement spree this week, indicating someone over there wants to change the press strategy, or at least start making some noise.

First came details about the "Saw" game. We all knew Jigsaw and friends would be coming to vidgames, of course, since it was part of Brash's public unveiling last spring in the pages of Variety. But we found out this week that it's going to be a truly next gen affair, possibly Brash's first, and also that it's not coming out until October of 2009, presumably along with the movie "Saw 6." (no, that's not a typo)

That'll be two and a half years from when Brash first talked about the game, an indication that development probably isn't going as fast as hoped. Nonetheless, company obviously thinks the "Saw" game is going to be a big deal, since it has already launched a website.

The other announcement was "Space Chimps," which comes out this summer. But while numerous websites picked it up as if it was fresh, the fact that Brash is doing a game based on the animated feature that Fox is distributing this summer for Vanguard and Starz about, well, chimps in space is old news for Variety readers. We first reported that Brash is doing a "Space Chimps" game back in November, as part of a story that also broke news about the "Jumper" game that comes out this month.

What's notable here is that up to now, Brash has been incredibly conservative about announcing their games. They only talked about the "Jumper" game three months before it came out, and they did the same with "Alvin and the Chipmunks," their not so hot first release. For whatever reasons, they have decided to loosen up, spilling some details about games that are five months and 18 months out.

Nonetheless, there's still a lot going on at Brash that we don't know. I've reported that they are working hard on a "300" video game for consoles, though we have no idea when that's coming out. I've heard rumors about several projects it has deals for with Fox, Warner Bros. and Universal. But I have also heard rumors about games that they had deals for that never ended up going into production, so who knows what'll end up being real. Suffice it to say that it'll be very interesting to see what (if anything?) Brash actually brings to market in the 2008 and '09 beyond "Space Chimps" and "Saw."