Looks like the rumor we broke back in January that Hollywood was flirting with the BioShock license was dead-on. Variety reports that Universal has signed a deal to turn BioShock into a movie. Director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) will head the project and Aviator writer John Logan may write the screenplay. Take-Two executive chairman Strauss Zelnick, who was in charge of Fox in the '90s, handled the deal for his company and says the project will actually get made ... unlike the Halo movie.

There's also an interview with Verbinski on Variety's Cut Scene blog where he discusses the project. He believes the movie will be rated "R" and says, in terms of the Little Sisters, that he'll take the issue "right up to the edge," not wanting the core audience to feel "betrayed." Though no release date is currently targeted, Verbinski says he'll start pre-production when Logan's script is finished and approved.

[Update: If there was any doubt as to the validity of this story, Take Two itself just issued confirmation that the movie adaptation of its undersea adventure is indeed in the works.]

While left out of the Quartermann roundup posted on 1UP yesterday, the oft-rumored, oft-denied BioShock PlayStation 3 port could arrive this September, reports NeoGAF user "SuperSonic1305" upon scavenging the June issue of EGM. The revived rumor suggests the port will include the extra DLC content and sport upgraded visuals (how about a better ending?). In addition, BioShock 2 reportedly will be "shown" around the same time the port is due. Presumably, the sequel (or prequel?) will be released for Xbox 360 and PC, with a likely version developed for PS3 as well -- why not? And if that is the case, it might make sense to prime the Sony faithful with a port of the original, though BioShock is quickly becoming "last year's game." Two questions: Is a PS3 port too late to the party? But if it is arriving, however late, why keep it a secret?

"Wake up, Samus!"

"What is it, Weekly Webcomic Wrapup?"

"I just had the craziest dream. I was in the movie theater with my mom and grandmother and we were trying to decide what to buy tickets for. There were two movies: A Flicker, and one called Ludwig Kietzmann."

"Isn't that your editor?"

"Yeah, but there's nothing weird about dreaming about your superior's name, is there? ... Anyway, so we buy tickets to Flicker, and we walk into the theater -- no bigger than my college dorm room, mind you -- and the screen starts showing BioShock footage. It was an origins of BioShock movie, except instead of splicers the people turned into demons. And the Big Daddy, he was skipping and dancing around like from a 1950s musical!"

"Skipping? Webby, I think you need to stick to your namesake."

• A Preview (Penny Arcade)
• Wheel of Fate (2P Start)
• Nested Ironies (Penny Arcade)
• Theory of Evolution (2P Start)
• Make it Double (VG Cats)
• If buying a car was like Bad Company (Extra Life)
• Zero Punctuation, Multiple Puncture Wounds (Dueling Analogs)
• Some Restrictions Apply (Digital Unrest)

(Voting after the break.)

As predictable as adapting moody, atmospheric shooter BioShock into a movie is – hell, if they're squeezing a mobile game out of the "franchise" a movie hardly seems far-fetched – we weren't quite expecting to hear that owner Take-Two is considering a BioShock MMO as well. (Also listed as an "MMOG/Online Gaming" opportunity: Civilization.)

Maybe Take-Two's just really into alliteration and thought the two extra Ms made slide 24 – titled "Potential Untapped Opportunities" – of chairman Strauss Zelnick's presentation at the 2008 Smid Cap Conference today that much more attractive? Or maybe it wanted to show shareholders that Take-Two has everything it needs to compete with the likes of EA in-house, including big-name brands that can be milked to exhaustion. Might we suggest sure-to-be-lucrative BioShock Big Daddy mittens ... or perhaps BioShock "Plasmid brand" malted milk balls ...

[Via Massively]

It's no secret that Electronic Arts has had its eye on Take-Two Interactive lately, but a purchase of the company means a lot more than logos and IPs.

What follows is an examination of the development resources under the Take-Two umbrella. Take a look, you may just be surprised how big that bumbershoot is. For instance, were you aware that that there are more than eight Rockstars? No? Well, what are you wasting your time here for?

It's time to get educated.

Aside from one 'shocking revelation and news of a Borderlands release shift, Take-Two's first fiscal quarter financial results did contain, you know, financial results. Ending January 31, 2008, the quarter saw a net loss of $38 million, a $16.5 million increase compared to the previous year's $21.5 million loss for the same quarter.

Net revenue for the three-month period was $240.4 million, a decrease from $277.3 million gained during the opening quarter of fiscal 2007. Key contributors to Take-Two's revenue were BioShock, the Wii's (and soon to be DS') Carnival Games, NBA 2K8 and the good ol' Grand Theft Auto franchise. Unsurprisingly, the publisher predicts improved results once the felonious franchise reaches number four.

After sales of brainy first-person shooter BioShock were so strong, a sequel seemed like all but a foregone conclusion. 2K Games put any remaining doubt to bed today, revealing that BioShock 2 is due to hit shelves in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2009, which would put it between August and October of 2009. The game is being developed not by Ken Levine's 2K Boston, but rather 2K Marin, which reportedly has some BioShock staffers on board. At this point, we don't know what (if any) involvement Levine will have, nor do we know what systems it will be on.

The info came in an investor relations report released by the company today. Even though we figured the game was in the works, we have to admit we're a little surprised by the window, just two years after its predecessor. But you're not going to hear us complaining. If it means more Big Daddies and Little Sisters, we don't really care where we get it.

Playing (and being) Too Human

Elsewhere that day, Silicon Knights' boastful Denis Dyack held a press conference showing off the latest build of Too Human (photos) and, lo and behold, the framerate was consistent and the game looked much improved from previous demonstrations. Our hands-on impressions were decidedly mixed, however; as one commenter aptly put it, "the controls hindered Baldur's gait."

Besides Microsoft, the other keynote of the conference was futurist Ray Kurzweil who, among other mind-blowing points, confirmed that by 2023 we will be injecting ourselves with plasmids. Speaking of which ...

BioShockTacular!

One of the Big Daddies of the conference (yes folks, plenty more puns to come!) was BioShock, with total rock star Ken Levine drawing quite a crowd. Levine et al. showed off early footage of the game, advised to keep story simple, talked Steamworks and even sent a splicer to check up on us.

GDCA and IGF Awards

BioShock was a major winner at the Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA), walking away with honors for audio, visuals and writing (Ayn Rand woke from the dead to claim the writing award). Also announced that night were the Independent Games Festival awards, with World of Goo winning three nods and Crayon Physics Deluxe earning the Seamus McNally award. Cheer up, World of Goo fans, they already have a distribution deal for the Nintendo Wii. The best part of the award presentations were probably Mega64 and Zero Punctuation's hilarious videos.

Despite three accolades, BioShock didn't win Best Game. That award went to Portal along with design and innovation nods.


Portal: This was a Triumph

Remember last year when Portal was just a bullet point during the Experimental Games session? A lot has changed since GDC 2007, with almost everyone singing the game's praises. The night of their GDCA win, Valve revealed that Jonathan Coulton's Portal song "Still Alive" would be featured in Rock Band. Though we missed that performance (Coulton only hit 95% on vocals), we did happen to catch his concert on Friday where he, along with Leo LaPorte and Mahalo Daily's Veronica Belmont, managed to fail the song live on stage (video).

As one of the last sessions of the conference, designer Kim Swift and writer Erik Wolpaw delivered a Portal post-mortem (photos) for an overpacked crowd (did you see the line to get in?). Among other little details, the duo talked about the origins of the Weighted Companion Cube and the various final levels they tested.

Watching us from afar in San Francisco's Grand Café (the one where, legend has it, Justin ate six PlayStation 3s and drank a PSP shake) was the ghost of a one-time splicer from BioShock (here's visual reference). Even weirder still, our waiter was a Big Daddy -- don't ask with what (or rather, on whom) he wrote our orders.

Throughout his discussion of BioShock's story on Wednesday, Ken Levine referenced the folks at Valve and the top notch work they had done on games like Half-Life 2. Before the talk started we overheard him talking about the Steamworks announcement, and when we joined a large discussion of attendees after the event ended we asked the man himself what he thought.

What do you think of the Steamworks announcement?

"I think the great thing about Valve is they understand you don't have to make every penny off of everybody every second to make the big dollar. Google has a similar approach. You don't feel like you're being constantly fleeced - Valve has a very sophisticated model, they're very smart guys, and I think it's really exciting. It's great for developers. It's great for Valve, it's great for everybody else, and it's great for people making games.

How much do you think Steam helped BioShock?

"I think one of the great things about Valve is that they are developers. I've worked with some big companies, and as developers they're professional, they're on the ball, I can't think of a single mistake that they made. They're taking it very seriously."

Tuesday afternoon four well-known games industry writers and designers got together to discuss the best storytelling gaming has to offer in a panel entitled "Stories Best Played: Deconstructing the Best Interactive Storytelling." Each of the authors brought a pair of games that they viewed as some of the narratively strongest yet made. Prior to the panel all four men played the ten titles, and came prepared to talk about the strengths and merits of each. Panelists Richard Rouse (Paranoid Productions), Steve Meretzky (Blue Fang), Marc Laidlaw (Valve Software), and Ken Rolston (Big Huge Games) offered up, in essence, a 'top eight' list for gamers looking to get more from exposition than explosions.

Read on for views from a panel of expert opinions on the likes of Loom, BioShock, Phoenix Wright and the legendary Planescape: Torment.

Yesterday morning we had the chance to listen to Ken Levine speak on the storytelling process behind his hit title, BioShock. The quick Zero Punctuation video got big laughs, but there was another video during the presentation that more accurately represented what Ken was talking about. Above is a picture of a stage in the development of the Little Sisters, a hint at other (stranger?) versions of Rapture and its denizens. You can catch other stages in the Sisters development in our gallery of photos from the talk.

Like the Little Sisters concept, the video itself shows an early version of Rapture. The beautiful art-deco world we know and love is an ugly, boxy, warehouse of a place. Check it out below the cut for raging Big Daddies, worm-like Little sSsters, and one of the quickest "time to crate" experiences in gaming.

Ken Levine may be the guy who gets interrupted at the Spike VGAs, but when he's at the Game Developer's Conference he is a god among nerds, whose every step echoes through the halls of the Moscone Center like Thor ... if Thor made good games.

Want proof? Check out the crowd that swarmed Levine to touch the hem of his garment after his lecture at the conference Wednesday morning. That's how Ken rolls. ... Wait. Do you think he's reading this right now? [swoon]

Ken Levine gave an amazing talk this morning on the process of crafting BioShock's story. There were two video presentations during the course of the talk and one of them was a hilarious mile-a-minute clip from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw - the twisted mind behind the Escapist's Zero Punctuation. We have a video of the clip, which was introduced by Levine as "their original idea for how to start BioShock", below the cut.