The only game based on 20th Century Fox’s upcoming feature film, Fantastic 4 is a team based action adventure in which players harness the Marvel superheroes’ unique and amazing powers through a compelling single-player mode or two-player co-operative gameplay experience. Authored by Zak Penn, the writer of the movie X2: X-Men United, the game’s storyline follows the Fantastic 4 movie plot and expands the adventures by letting players stretch, control fire and use invisibility and brute force to defeat evil super-villains in new environments and familiar comic book locales. Challenged to master each super hero’s individual powers and combine them to level even more devastating attacks, players must battle the never-before-seen enemies and the ultimate evil – Doctor Doom -- to save the human race from disaster.

GAME FEATURES:

• Relive the movie experience and go beyond it – Re-capture the movie experience and become the Fantastic 4; follow the story and battle Doctor Doom in locations taken straight from the movie while experiencing an original story, missions and environments exclusive to the game.
• Experience the Fantastic 4 in an all-new way – Play as your favorite Fantastic 4 team member as you assume their personas and master their individual attributes and unique powers to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles and defeat enemies.
  • Mr. Fantastic / Reed Richards – Use Mr. Fantastic’s ability to stretch in order to attack from a distance, squeeze into tight spaces and reach places no one else can. Use his brainpower to heal characters, hack computers, over-ride security systems and take control of enemy’s weapons to use against them.
  • Invisible Girl / Sue Storm – Play as the Invisible Girl to turn invisible and perform stealth moves with ninja like speed or use her telekinetic powers to immobilize enemies.
  • Human Torch/Johnny Storm – As the Human Torch, players can create walls of fire and supernova fireballs, shoot fire from their fingertips and bend flames at their will as they ward off enemies.
  • Thing/Ben Grimm – Use Thing’s raw brute force to pick up objects or tear them apart, break through walls and obstacles and obliterate enemies.
• Control the Fantastic 4 together as a team – While playing as a team of one to four characters, the game lets players dynamically switch between characters during their adventures and combine super powers in order to level more devastating attacks and accomplish missions.
• Share the Fantastic 4 experience with friends – Play through the game with a friend in two-player co-op story mode or fight against each other head-to-head in multiple arena battles each with their own special powers and attributes.

GCM:	Please get us started by introducing yourself and telling us about the team behind the Fantastic 4 video game.
Lewis Peterson:	I’m Lewis Peterson, president of 7 Studios. We started with a very small team that has since ramped up to about 40 people. When Activision announced that they had the [Fantastic 4] property, we immediately, on our own, did a prototype and put something together, even before the movie had been “green lit”.

GCM:

What percentage of the design team would you say are hardcore Fantastic 4 fans?

Lewis Peterson:

I’d have to say about half and half. We thought it was important, from a management perspective to stay true to the original comic book, and also the movie, but we also wanted the game to appeal to those who didn’t know anything about the Fantastic 4. A lot of people have heard about it; they know about “the stretchy guy: or the “rock guy” but they don’t necessarily know a lot about it, so we didn’t want to “geek out” too much, but we wanted to make sure we had all the references that the fans would pick up on. So it started off as half and half but as we worked on it everyone really got into it and now we’re all hardcore Fantastic 4 fans.

GCM:

Is the game using the movie or the comics (either original or ultimate) as its primary source of inspiration?

Lewis Peterson:

The look is a mixture of the movie and Ultimate as well as some new stuff that we’ve designed working with Fox. Any character in the game that is also in the movie we tried to stay close to that, designing the characters so they look just right. The costumes follow the Ultimate series that has recently come out. Anything that wasn’t in the movie or the comics, we worked very closely with Marvel to make sure they fit within the overall design. The overall story is hinged on the movie story but we also branch out a lot into different areas we thought were cool and that match with certain powers of the Fantastic 4. Also, you’ll get to meet enemies like Diablo and Mole Man.

GCM:

What steps are being taken to make this game approachable by people who have never read a Fantastic 4 comic or even seen the film?

Lewis Peterson:

It’s a nice thing that the movie is an “origins story”. We start the game with all four characters before they are the Fantastic 4. That’s one of the cool things about the Fantastic 4 as a property, is that they’re superheroes- but their not superheroes. They don’t have an alter ego; they are who they are. So the game, like the movie starts as they gain and explore their powers, much like the Spider-Man movie game where you are starting off in your own costume and you’re learning new things. So if you are a hardcore Fantastic 4 fan it’s cool because you now get to be Reed before he has the costume and he’s just trying to learn how to use his new abilities – you’re stretching but you don’t know why. And if you’re not a fan it’s still interesting because it’s now like, “OK, I’m the rock guy, what does he do? Oh, he picks up stuff and throws it” or, “Hey, Sue can turn invisible; that’s cool.” And then you get to see how they all work together.

GCM:

How much input did Stan Lee and Marvel have in the creation or art direction of this game?

Lewis Peterson:

We worked very closely with Marvel. This is one of their founding properties of the company, so Marvel was really into it and wanted to make sure we did it right. We also worked closely with Fox on elements pertaining to the movie. One of the great things we got to do was have Stan Lee come over to the office, play the game, look at it, and give us feedback. To see the light in his eyes as he plays Ben Grimm, gets to see The Thing, do the body slams, it was like, “wow, this is how I imagined it.” When he was first drawing the sketches and writing the story he never thought he would see it “come to life” like this.

GCM:

How will the gameplay handle four unique characters? Will they work as a team with the player switching among them or will each level revolve around a specific character? Or can each level be played as any of the Four with alternating gameplay?

Lewis Peterson:

It’s actually a little bit of both. We wanted to make sure and feature each character and their special powers. It’s a big challenge to do a game with four characters that have such different powers, so we wanted to make sure we had levels that featured Johnny Storm and how he could burn things up, and some levels that showed how Sue could be stealthy or lock up characters or blast them with force fields, but we also wanted to make sure we had the opportunity to see how they all worked together as a team. That’s one of the biggest aspects of the Fantastic 4. They all have unique powers and they're cool powers – and they could be a game by themselves, but the cool thing is how they work together as a team, and we wanted to make sure and have a lot of levels, and bosses especially, that have all four characters working together as a team to solve the problem they are facing.

GCM:

Does the game take any creative license with the characters or their abilities (i.e. powers not previous mentioned in the comic or movie)?

Lewis Peterson:

For a comic book that has been around since the 60’s it’s pretty hard to find an ability they haven’t already explored. In fact, that was one of the fun things we had to do initially was to go through and list all the things that Sue had done, all the things that Johnny could do, read through all the comics, and come up with a list of powers. The biggest challenge was to make sure that each character’s superpowers somehow complemented the rest of the team.

GCM:

Dr. Doom is the main movie villain. What other villains can we expect to see in the game?

Lewis Peterson:

We actually had to work with Marvel to help them re-imagine or reinvent a lot of the enemies in the game. As far as bosses, we’ve brought back Mole Man and Diablo. We really wanted to have Diablo in the game but there hasn’t been a new version of Diablo in a long time so our artists worked with theirs to come up with a new design for Diablo that is totally new to this game. In the original comics Diablo had these vials he would throw, so we had some fun expanding his powers in the game to show he was truly a master of the elements. We were able to take advantage of the fact that Mole Man had already been redesigned for the Ultimate series.

GCM:

Four superheroes working as a team begs for cooperative multiplayer. Will this game feature a cooperative campaign mode, and are there any plans for online play?

Lewis Peterson:

Fantastic 4 supports local two-player cooperative gameplay and each player can choose from any of the available characters just like you were playing alone. There are also special team combos where one player can grapple an enemy and the other player can finish the move. Even if you are playing alone there is a strong cooperative gameplay element to the Fantastic 4. It works on multiple levels for both the novice and the experience gamer. If you happen to be attacking an enemy that another character is attacking you can get a combo bonus.

GCM:

Are the special team moves and cosmic combos possible when playing alongside AI-controlled team members?

Lewis Peterson:

Definitely. In fact, the AI has a built-in propensity to grab hold of an enemy and set you up for a combo. That’s something we’re still playing with is the level at which the AI will grapple the enemy so you actually have the opportunity for a combo, even if you aren’t playing with a buddy. The AI will occasionally even do the team combos amongst themselves - sometimes moves you didn't even know about yet, so this will encourage the player to explore a little and figure out how to do that combo the computer just pulled off.

GCM:

Sue (Invisible Woman) is arguably the most powerful of the team. What were the challenges of balancing her and the other characters with the enemies and environments to make the player want (or need) to play with the entire team?

Lewis Peterson:

Balancing with four powerful characters is a huge challenge, Sue especially. We’d take a month and say, “OK, this is Ben month”, “this is Johnny month”, early in the development, and we’d be saying, “OK, how can we possibly make Johnny as cool as Sue is?” then we’d do Johnny and it was like, “wow, we thought Sue was cool but look what we’ve done with Johnny.” It was a constant battle but in the end I think we’ve come up with a good balance of characters with a similar suite of abilities, but each one feels really different, so when you’re playing you know what to do, you know how to pull off the cosmic combos, you know how to take care of business, but as you play through as each character it feels really different.

GCM:

Fantastic 4 has some RPG-like stats built into it. Can you elaborate on this system?

Lewis Peterson:

Each character has nearly 40 combat moves so there is a total of almost 150 moves you can unlock during the course of the game. It’s not a traditional RPG but as you play through each level you can unlock two or three new combos. That keeps the gameplay fresh, as your list of moves gets bigger and more powerful. The “resources” used to unlock these moves are awarded based on combat, and completing objectives, and finishing levels. You can also use these points to unlock special bonus material that we’re not really going into detail on yet. You can also play the game on Easy, Medium, and Hard to earn specific rewards for each level. If you love the game you can keep playing it. There is a lot to unlock.

GCM:

Does the gameplay encourage you to switch off to different characters or can you potentially play the game as just one of the Fantastic 4?

Lewis Peterson:

We wanted to make sure you were encouraged to switch so some areas and especially some bosses, you have certain challenges that only one member of the team can do, like the Mole boss for example, where you have to switch to Sue and freeze his hands then you can attack with Johnny or Reed. One part of it is we wanted to follow the story of the movie, but also we have these really cool characters with cool abilities and we wanted to make sure people enjoyed each one of them.

GCM:	Were you able to get the core movie cast to voice their videogame counterparts?
Lewis Peterson:	All of the key actors from the movie are in the game. We had them come in for voice-over sessions. They did a great job, they were willing, and actually excited to do it and it really adds a lot to the experience.

GCM:	The game is going to have a week head start on the movie. Will there be any potential spoilers that could take away from the theatrical experience?
Lewis Peterson:	I don’t think so. Most of the game goes into a different realm and there’s not much of a secret as to whether the good guys win or not. Plus most people are so familiar with the story that the game really isn’t going to spoil anything. The game really expand upon the movie and goes into a lot of different areas, so if you see the movie you’ll really want to play the game.

GCM:	The Spider-Man games are a huge success and now we have Ultimate Spider-Man coming this year. If Fantastic 4 were a hit would you consider doing an Ultimate Fantastic 4 videogame?
Lewis Peterson:	That would be a very logical next step. There’s nothing set in stone right now but we personally at 7 Studios would love to do an Ultimate Fantastic 4.

GCM:	Are there any system specific features or significant technological or gameplay differences that make any of the versions standout above the others?
Lewis Peterson:	We were able to take advantage of the Xbox and its higher resolution output, but for the most part the game is equal across both platforms.

GCM:	Thank you again for your time! Do you have any last impressions or thoughts for our readers?
Lewis Peterson:	Fantastic 4 just isn’t about combat. There is a fun intellectual mini-game, puzzle aspect to it that is peppered throughout the game, so with Reed there are hacking puzzles while Ben gets challenges that are more strength-based. Basically, there is something here for all types of gamers, whether you are a fan of the Fantastic 4 or not.

---