Ghostbusters may slime 360s

Over the weekend, a handful of YouTube videos began circulating the Internet, showing the geeky fantasy of just about every gamer who was a kid in the 1980s. The footage apparently showed a new game based on the 1984 comedy Ghostbusters, which was about a group of nerdy paranormal scientists ridding New York City of an influx of specters.

The Gears of War-style camera angles and gritty New York City environment (as well as one cutscene featuring Bill Murray's Peter Venkman) left many fans of the movie with hope that they would be busting ghosts on a home console soon. Others believed that the game was just a Half-Life 2 or Gears mod and would never see the light of day.

The videos were uploaded by an employee at ZootFly, a Slovenian game studio that previously worked on more than a dozen titles, including Panzer Elite Action: Fields of Glory.

Today, the company updated its Web site and confirmed that the footage was indeed real, was not a mod of another game, was in-game footage, and was running on the Xbox 360. However, the game is merely a prototype and development has "hit a bump on the road."

That "bump" is apparently copyright issues with the Ghostbusters name. A post on ZootFly's Web site says, "Everybody here at Zootfly is working actively on resolving the challenges with the owners of the Ghostbusters IP." If ZootFly can manage to resolve the IP issues, development on the game will continue.

In the meantime, ZootFly is working on an original game called TimeO, which also deals with a spooky New York setting. In TimeO, an "urban explorer" and an investigative reporter open up a portal to a parallel New York, "where the city itself is a war machine threatening to wipe out our world." No other details on the game have been announced. [UPDATE] ZootFly has told GameSpot that TimeO is being developed for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and "probably for [the] Wii."