Newsgab: Unofficial Ghostbusters Officially XBox 360 Bound?

A few days ago prototype videos of an unknown Ghostbusters video game were seen around the internet. The game appeared to be somewhat of a sequel to the popular blockbuster hit movies from the eighties. Yesterday European developer ZootFly confirmed the videos to be in-game footage an early prototype on the Xbox 360.

The promising videos gameplay looks to be a "Gears of War" style 3rd Person Shooter.

Videos:





The developer recently updated their site in response to the excitement generated by the videos:

What you’ve seen is indeed in-game footage of early prototypes on the Xbox 360, running on ZootFly’s proprietary engine. Due to licensing issues, further development of the Ghostbusters game hit a bump on the road, but everybody here at ZootFly is working actively on resolving the challenges with the owners of the Ghostbusters IP.

Not to lose the momentum, a part of the ZootFly team is currently working on an original game called TimeO, which is closely related to Ghostbusters. The game follows the adventures of two die-hard New Yorkers. They get trapped deep in the shadow world of a parallel New York. The city itself is a war machine threatening to wipe out our world and they have three days to stop it.

As soon as the Ghostbusters IP issue is resolved, the whole team will go back to Ghostbusters. In the meantime, please enjoy these two movies.

Currently the property is owned by Columbia Pictures which happens to be a part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment. Considering development is for the XBox 360 hopefully the properties ties to Sony won't be a issue. In addition licencing issues, in terms of character likeness, has been somewhat of a problem in the past with the official merchandise and cartoons. In the animated cartoon show the "Real Ghostbusters" the character likenesses had to be changed. Whether or not ZootFly would consider going with the "Real Ghostbusters" licence seems unlikely considering the current look of the game.

From the comments posted on the ZootFly website we can gather that if ZootFly cannot obtain official licencing we may still see the game in some form. "TimeO" doesn't seem to have the same appeal as "Ghostbusters" though.

There have been many Ghostbusters games released on older consoles in the days of Atari and the later released Sega Master System and Nintendo Entertainment System including a somewhat popular arcade game but none of these games really captured the true action of Ghostbusters. Hopefully fans will finally get to play a game that will give them the real excitement they get from the movie.

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Completely useless somewhat relevant Ghostbusters trivia:

Lorenzo Music, the voice actor who voiced Garfield in the cartoon "Garfield and Friends", was the voice for Peter Venkman in "the Real Ghostbusters" cartoon.

Bill Murray, who played Peter Venkman in the Ghostbusters movie, was the voice for Garfield in the live action picture "Garfield: The Movie" and it's sequel "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties".