Because Rockstar know you can read too, today they've announced yet another way in which LA Noire is not just a video game.
The game hasn’t even been released yet, but Rockstar keep working to make sure we realise that this is much, much more than a video game. First it got selected as part of the Tribeca Film Festival – the first video game ever to do so – and now the video game company has partnered with book publishers Little, Brown and Company to release a series of short stories based on the game.
LA Noire: The Collected Stories is an anthology of crime stories, some of which feature characters and cases from the video game re-imagined and reinterpreted by renowned noir writers including Megan Abbot, Lawrence Block, Francine Prose, Duane Swierczynski and Joe Lansdale.
As Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar explains, the inspiration for LA Noire came from ‘not just film, but also great crime literature’. The short stories use the ‘game’s world as a springboard’ to create ‘stories that lived up to the finest traditions of crime fiction.’
Little, Brown and Company’s motivations were a little different, but interesting. They were excited about how the cross-promotion would be ‘encouraging gamers to read and readers to play games’, says their publisher, Michael Pietsch, and are definitely open to working on this kind of project again in the future.
While the subject matter may lend itself more to a pulpy, old-school paperback, LA Noire: The Collected Stories will be published across all major digital platforms and be available to download from June 6th, or you can get yourself a taste of the kind of writing you’ll be in for by visiting Rockstar Games now. LA Noire is, of course, coming to PS3 and Xbox later this month, as we’ve told you over and over again here on this fine website. We look forward to getting our hands on it and going all gumshoe for a while.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012