Peter Jackson branches out into games

Now we know what Peter Jackson has been doing during his down time between King Kong and whichever of his upcoming projects he makes next: playing videogames.

All right, perhaps not – but he has sold his soul to Microsoft and teamed up with the company to form Wingnut Interactive, his very own games company.

And he’s kicking off with one of the projects he’s already involved in – Halo. One of the company’s first products will be a spin-off from the upcoming film adaptation. We can’t wait – wouldn’t you want to play a game based on Halo. Oh, no… Hang on…

The nitty gritty points of the deal are still being hammered out (Jackson obviously needs to find out which of his children Microsoft will be legally adopting), but apparently the writer-director will write the Halo spin-off with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

The new venture was announced at a recent Microsoft game conference, where Jackson mentioned that the new product will be "not quite a game, not quite a film." So, a galm, then? "The basic idea is to create a kind of interactive entertainment that's not games as we know it," Jackson’s manager Kamins explained to Variety. "Microsoft and Wingnut are going to attempt to figure out how to articulate that together."

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