James Cameron Avatar Game Screenshots from E3

Movie director James Cameron grabbed center stage at Ubisoft‘s E3 press conference on Monday to tease us a little about his upcoming epic movie Avatar, as well as the tie-in video game.

Apparently, Cameron is really happy with the game thus far.

“It’s pretty fantastic,” said Cameron, revealing he had a chance to actually play the game the other day.

“It’s one of the first times in a video game I was actually afraid,” he said. The hammerheads and viper wolves are particularly frightening, apparently.

Cameron first wrote the storyline for the Avatar movie about 14 years ago but technology wasn’t ready to bring it to the silver screen.  That all changed, however, when James Cameron saw Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

Here are some more facts about the Avatar video game:

• Ubisoft acquired a graphic design company named Hybride, which is creating over 100 of the CGI shots for the film.
• Cameron said that the film takes place in the 22nd century, on a large Earth-like moon called Pandora, with rain forests, 1000-foot tall trees, and many different types of critters.  He described the Na’vi as 10 feet tall and striped like tigers.
• Weta provided Ubisoft with all the assets , models, and animations used in the movie. Cameron says that the game will have its own creatures, weapons and settings, some of which was designed by Ubisoft, and some of which were created specifically for the game only by Weta. Cameron says that he even incorporated assets that Ubisoft created for the game into the movie. because he liked the designs so much.
• The game tells a story that parallels the film, so you could play the whole game without spoiling the movie.
• The player can choose to be either human of Na’vi, and the who the bad guy is depends on which side you choose to play as.
• Cameron said that most video games based on movie properties kinda suck, and that he hopes revolutionize the model of movie to video game adaptations.
• “This film is way beyond anything I’ve ever done before, which is why its taken four years to date, and we have seven months to go,” said Cameron. “The live-action portion was filmed with cameras that took us 9 years to develop.”
• Ubisoft has been working on the game for over two and a half years.
• It will be the first major stereoscopic video game developed in 3D from the ground up.
• Ubisoft also announced that they will be working with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson on a video game version of the upcoming Tintin movies.
• No footage was shown during the press conference, but a demo will be available to press at E3.