2K Games to input Da Vinci Code

As much as people might bemoan the decline of the printed word's value in our society, it seems every year there's another hugely popular book racking up incredible sales and becoming a cross-cultural phenomenon complete with an inevitable movie adaptation. Some of these book-based movies seem tailor-made for games (Jurassic Park, Harry Potter), while others just don't lend themselves so well to the medium (The Bridges of Madison County, Tuesdays with Morrie).

Given a storyline devoid of both dinosaurs and dragons, but rife with suspense and intrigue, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, in which a Harvard professor investigates a murder at the Louvre Museum in Paris that leads to revelations about secret societies and international cover-ups, lies somewhere in between. Gamers everywhere will find out soon just how well Brown's tale acquits itself to the interactive environment, as 2K Games today announced that it will publish games based on director Ron Howard's film adaptation of the book. Both the film and the games are scheduled to be released in May of 2006.

The games will be developed for current-generation consoles by The Collective. While it hasn't worked on something with literary roots before, the developer has a long track record of bringing TV and film properties to games. The Collective worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen, Men in Black, and Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. And currently the developer is working on Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure and another movie-based property, Dirty Harry.

2K Games has promised that the Da Vinci Code game will feature "action-oriented suspense" to please gamers and fans of the book alike. For that reason, the publisher has brought veteran developer Charles Cecil into the fold to work with The Collective. Cecil created the Broken Sword series of adventure games, latter-day throwbacks to a deliberately paced style of gameplay, where the emphasis is on puzzle-solving and storytelling instead of making things explode. Cecil's Revolution Software is currently working on the fourth Broken Sword game, which is set for release on the PC next summer.