Boom Blox: Spielberg’s Wii Game

A new game called Boom Blox has been created for the Wii by film maker Steven Spielberg. Created in collaboration with Electronic Arts, it’s a game of knocking blocks into each other and Wired says it’s rather good. In regards to Spielberg’s approach to the game, Wired says:

The man behind Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park is making not a photorealistic shooter but a cross between Tetris and Jenga. It all goes back to when he was a kid, Spielberg says. He’d spend hours setting up his electric trains so that the locomotives would crash into one another. Now, with the help of a design team at Electronic Arts, Spielberg hopes to recapture that spirit of creative destruction in Boom Blox, out in May.

Inspired by a Wii tennis session, the auteur got the idea of combining Nintendo’s innovative Wiimote motion-sensing controller with his youthful delight in mayhem…. Spielberg didn’t just hand off a high concept and then disengage. “He weighed in on everything from the look of the characters and environments to the way the balls move through the air to the different game modes,” [says Amir Rahimi, the game’s senior producer].

One of those modes challenges players to extract blocks from a complex tower without the whole thing collapsing. Basically, it’s Jenga — except that in this digitized version, the buildings are inhabited by cute little creatures. That detail was 100 percent Spielberg. “We were on the path of creating a very generic puzzle game,” Rahimi says. “He brought in the idea of having characters you interact with to give it an emotional wrapper.”

Boom Blox on Amazon

Wired: Steven Spielberg’s Wii-Inspired Videogame Is a Demolitious Block Party