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Last weekend, "Game of Thrones" aired its series finale, and an extremely vocal contingent of fans made their dissatisfaction known on social media and Internet message boards. That was the pattern for just about every episode in the show’s eighth and final season, but one person who wasn’t complaining was author George R. R. Martin, whose novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire" serves as the basis for "Game of Thrones."
Posting on his quaintly understated official blog, Martin’s tone was gracious and grateful. “I want to thank people, but there are so many,” he wrote following the finale’s airing.“But I do need to mention David Benioff, Dan Weiss, Bryan Cogman…and of course the great team at HBO, headed by Richard Plepler.”
He then went on to remind fans that while "Game of Thrones" is ending, the careers of the people involved with it are not, including his own. In addition to working on the two remaining "Song of Ice and Fire" novels, Martin has a number of other projects going on, which he listed as:
“As a producer, I’ve got five shows in development at HBO (some having nothing whatsoever to do with the world of Westeros), two at Hulu, one on the History Channel. I’m involved with a number of feature projects, some based upon my own stories and books, some on material created by others. There are these short films I am hoping to make, adaptations of classic stories by one of the most brilliant, quirky, and original writers our genre has ever produced. I’ve consulted on a video game out of Japan…”
Considering that Martin is a writer, and not a programmer or visual artist, it seems most likely that his consultation was as a scenario writer or conceptual world designer. Where the possibilities get really interesting is a report from gaming website Gematsu, which suggests that Martin’s video game collaboration is with Developer From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of the trio of hits "Dark Souls," "Bloodborne" and "Sekiro."
Citing “a person familiar with ongoings at From Software,” Gematsu says that the game is being developed under the codename “GR,” and describes it as “an open-world title” with horse-riding, which would suggest a large-scale fantasy world.
▼ Martin and Miyazaki have a shared forte: gritty sword-and-sorcery epics with copious amounts of political conflict and/or social upheaval, and a general shunning of simple “good guy defeats bad guys with his sword, everyone lives happily ever after” narratives.
Gematsu’s source claims the game will be published by Bandai Namco (publisher for the three games in the "Dark Souls" series), and that an official announcement is coming at this year’s E3 trade show in Los Angeles, which kicks off June 11.
While we’ll have to wait and see if Gematsu’s specific information turns out to be true, Martin himself saying he’s already worked with a Japanese developer means there’s a game of some sort on the way, and considering how awesome the results were for the anime-style covers for the "Song of Ice and Fire" books in Japan, odds are we can expect something awesome from the next meeting of Martin’s writing and Japanese creators.
Sources: George R. R. Martin official blog, Gematsu via Hachima Kiko
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5 Comments
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therougou
How about promoting game of thrones in Japan first. Most people are clueless about it. I've gotten 5 coworkers to watch it, so surely if they promoted it more people would watch.
mikeylikesit
The fat man will do anything and everything these days, so long as it keeps him from having to write. How many years overdue is his latest book now? I remember a few years ago when Martin announced a delay to his penultimate book, a friend said something to the effect, "At least it will be out next year, before the TV show finishes." "Wanna bet?" I said, and I predicted that the TV show would wrap up at least a year before Martin finishes writing, if he ever does. TV show is done, and still no book.
Martin did well imagining an interesting world and cultures in that world, but he wrote himself into a hole. Too many perspective characters and too much nihilism toward virtue has left him no direction to write toward an ending. The TV producers shoehorned an ending onto the story, but they'd already streamlined much of the story prior to that. Even then, they had to flip the entire storytelling perspective to a psychological one, which Martin's novels and the early seasons of the TV show don't use. The story reached an ending, but not a convincing or satisfying one. Martin is struggling with an even bigger task wrapping up the novels, and each book has taken him progressively longer to write. He seems unable to find a clear way to an ending, and each book is taking longer and longer to get out. Martin is almost certain to die before the last book is finished because it is, in a sense, unfinishable.
smithinjapan
So, it'll never get done.
stormcrow
Priority number one should be finishing the damn books!
USNinJapan2
Just. Finish. The. Damned. Books. George.