The games find their strongest settings in vast and dangerous worlds where any character can have his or her own quest to follow, while an episodic television drama is far more adept at zeroing in on a handful of individual protagonists. It's the difference between aerial footage of the Normandy invasion and the intimacy of a foxhole monologue.
"That is absolutely the challenge, and it's an exciting one," said Adam Stotsky, Sci Fi's executive vice president of global brand strategy and market development. "Putting these creative people from very different fields in the same room together creates a lot of energy, and there's strong curiosity about each other's craft."
Lars Buttler, co-founder and chief executive of Trion, said that the game will live entirely online and that vistas will open as the television series takes the characters throughout their world. The game will continue to grow, and "footage" of players in battles or other mass gatherings will be incorporated into the series. The TV show will match the game in its look, with a green-screen hyper reality, much like the film "300," Howe said.
Buttler's company is partnered with Hewlett Packard and has raised $30 million from investors such as Time Warner and General Electric. He said the focus of the company is to pounce on the concept that discs and downloads are being left behind and that online games are the "clear future."
The virtual world that pulls in fans of the show will also give Buttler and his team hard data about which characters, settings and story lines stir the most interests. He said that will help the show's producers bend their story lines to audience tastes -- a notion that might not sit well with some purists who think a drama should be guided by decisions of art rather than market research. Clearly, though, the very nature of television programming is in flux, and Howe said fans have an appetite for a new level of participation and tailored entertainments.
"This will be a state-of-the art game and it will be a strong television show, and watching how those two things interact will be fascinating," he said.
Early on, Sci Fi planned to take the existing universe of the channel's signature show, the Peabody Award-winning "Battlestar Galactica," and launch a series and gaming community through its familiar mythology. But Stosky said the decision was made to start from scratch.
"In 'Battlestar,' the fans have a sense of who is good and who is not, which side they want to be on and the parameters and definitions of the universe around them," Stosky said. "We realized that for us to truly do this in a powerful way, it would be best to start over with many of those questions still hanging."
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geoff.boucher@latimes.com
