Video Games: You Ought to Be in Pixels

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You can tell that James Bond 007: Everything Or Nothing is a video game the same way you can spot the difference between a painting and a person. But people in the next room can't. They hear the voices of the real Pierce Brosnan and Judi Dench bantering about the usual enjoyable spy nonsense--nuclear suitcases from Tajikistan!--as created by veteran Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein (GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies). "You're either terrified of the future or you embrace it," says Feirstein, who had never written a game before. "Games are the future. I'd write another one in a heartbeat."

Feirstein is not the only Hollywood type who has seen the light. If anything, he's a little late. Video games overtook movies in the annual revenue race in 1999. But that was an apples-to-oranges contest. The average game costs up to five times as much as a movie ticket. And back then a console title was a movie afterthought, a more expensive Burger King toy. Now, with original blockbuster fare like Everything or Nothing, released in February, the titans of the $21 billion games business have shown their Hollywood cousins (a puny $9.2 billion biz) they can lead as well as follow.

As goes the money, so follows the talent. Musicians like Mya and Method Man are lending their skills to game sound tracks (a smart move, as the average title is played for 50 hours). And as goes talent, so follows buzz. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which won Best Game of the Year at last month's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., got more adulation from critics and Star Wars junkies than any of the Lucas movie prequels. And games are getting even more ambitious: Half Life 2, with a record-breaking $40 million budget, has been six years in development, with no end in sight.

The games world is going Hollywood in the wrong ways too--falling back on formulas and pandering to 18-to-35-year-old males, for example. But just as in the movies, many of the major players are entertainment innovators. Here are five of them:

Bruno Bonnell = Michael Eisner CEO of Atari CEO of Disney

Mogul of the Matrix

Bruno Bonnell wants to be the next Michael Eisner--literally. "No company has ever impressed me more than Disney, and I hear they may be looking for a new boss," says the head of games giant Atari in his heavily accented French. "Maybe I should apply?" It's just a light-hearted thought for now. But if there's one thing you learn from looking at Bonnell's career, it's never to underestimate his ability to leapfrog. Leaping frogs, in fact, is where he started. In 1983 Bonnell co-wrote Autoroute, the French version of Frogger. He then founded one games company, Infogrames, and proceeded to snap up 25 others--including the onetime arcade giant Atari, which last year became the name of the whole conglomerate.