By Chris Kohler

May 6, Wired


Steven Spielberg knows a thing or two about action games. He advised on the development of the Medal of Honor series, based on his film Saving Private Ryan, and he claims to be on his second play-through of the processor-punishing PC title Crysis. So it's a bit surprising to learn that for his first venture as a videogame creative director, 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. In the first few levels, you hurl balls at a pile of blocks. The aim? To knock it down. But it's not just mindless destruction — you have to think strategically about which blocks to take out in order to bring the whole stack down quickly. "When you pick up that Wiimote and start bashing stuff, it satisfies something primal," says Amir Rahimi, the game's senior producer.

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