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Starbreeze Announces John Wick Virtual Reality Game
The studio behind games like The Darkness, Payday 2, and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay have partnered with Lionsgate and others to create a virtual reality game based on the 2014 movie, John Wick.
Starbreeze is serving mostly as publisher of the game and it is being developed by two companies, WEVR and Grab. According to the press release for the announcement, the John Wick VR game will be a first-person shooter and be centered around the Continental Hotel, the mysterious location in the film that serves as a safe zone of sorts for the world's best assassins.
Ahead of the game, there will be an opportunity to play a "promotional experience" version of the game on the HTC Vive World Tour, which is promoting HTC and Valve's virtual reality device, the Vive. A teaser of the game will also be available at the launch of HTC Vive through SteamVR. The date of the availability of that demo (and the launch of Vive) will be revealed later this year, and the full game is expected to be available spring 2016 for multiple VR platforms, not just Vive.
Last year, Starbreeze's Payday 2 (which it co-developed with Overkill Software) released free John Wick DLC. You can read more about that here.
Our Take
I, as I'm sure most do, tend to write off promotional overlaps and video game adaptations of film, but I'm pretty excited about this. John Wick was a very cool movie with a surprisingly fascinating lore that was only barely touched upon. A video game is the perfect way to expand the universe while also letting players experience the film's gunplay. If this is a success, I hope Starbreeze and those involved will consider doing something similar for another movie I love that I was reminded of while watching John Wick: Shoot 'em Up.
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