District 9 Director Neill Blomkamp Is Working On A Multiplayer Shooter With Gunzilla Games

District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp has joined developer Gunzilla Games as its chief visionary officer, a long-term role that will see him work on the studio's unrevealed multiplayer shooter with narrative elements. Speaking to IGN, Blomkamp explained that his directorial skills will be used to guide the game forward in the design, audio, and storytelling departments.

"The difference [from directing a film] is not acting like a single point that guides the creative team," Blomkamp said. "It's making sure that you're integrated into the team in a real way. I can come in with a very definitive point of view, but it has to work on two levels. It has to be accepted by the greater team as the right creative direction to go in. And it also has to be, first and foremost, something that can integrate into the architecture of gameplay in a way that's beneficial to the game."

Before he starts work on the game, Blomkamp will be working on getting Gunzilla's debut right and refining the narrative design of the game, something which Blomkamp compared to Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin's contribution to From Software's upcoming Elden Ring. As for why Blomkamp is entering the gaming development space? That comes down to the filmmaker wanting to use his expertise to step into a medium that he believes will be the "dominant" form of entertainment" in the years to come.

"Games will become what films were in the 20th century," Blomkamp said. "They'll just be the thing that is the dominant form of cultural entertainment and [I want] to be in that. Mixing my history in visual effects and interest in 3D graphics means I want to have a home base in the creation of games for a really long time. So if the game is a success and everything works out, hopefully, I'm staying at Gunzilla for a long time."

This isn't the first time that Blomkamp has been involved in video games. The director was at one point linked to a Halo feature film after his work on Halo: Landfall, that Lord of the Rings mastermind Peter Jackson would have produced, as well as a Halo TV series project in the mid-2010s. More recently, Blomkamp directed an Anthem short film back in 2019 for the ill-fated BioWare game.