Top Story
Epic Games will stream a Christopher Nolan movie in Fortnite this summer
As the COVID-19 wreaks havoc with economies and industries across the globe, some of them are starting to invent new ways to stay open for business – and Fortnite is helping lead the charge.
Fortnite has hosted concerts, disabling all the usual looting and shooting in favour of making players part of a live music video. So far these events have been tremendously successful, and now Hollywood wants in on the action.
Movinite: The movie industry has already experimented with simultaneous releases in theatres and streaming services, but what about videogames? The biggest ones can reach humongous audiences, and the Travis Scott event drew 12.3 million conccurent players. In short: it’s an untapped audience.
Virtual cinema: An as-yet-unnamed Christopher Nolan movie will be screened in Fortnite this summer. The trailer for Nolan’s latest movie Tenet is already showing in Party Royale mode, and if this turns out to be a success there will probably be more to come. Fortnite as the biggest game AND streaming platform? Stranger things have happened!
Time For A Quick Daily Quiz?
What was Conker’s Bad Fur Days called during development?
- Conker’s Quest
- Conker’s Pocket Tales
- Diddy Kong Racing
- Project Spark
The answer will be revealed at the bottom of today’s issue. Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss what the answer could be.
Daily Fact
Walk away, get yourself a Pikachu
Around the time Niantic’s hugely successful Pokémon GO was launched, you could exploit a bug to reject Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur and bag yourself a Pikachu right off the bat.
How? Just walk away from the starter spawns four times! It’s a bit like the original Pokémon adventures on Game Boy, where you’d need to capture Pikachu out in the wilds. Pokémon Yellow was the first game to offer the electric rodent as a starting companion, and even let him travel alongside you outside the Pokéball!
Join up with our community on Twitter and Facebook to discuss today’s fact.
Industry News
Nvidia AI creates Pac-Man from scratch
GPU manufacturer Nvidia has turned their attention towards AI, and has trained one to recreate the game Pac-Man from scratch by showing it 50,000 sessions from the game.
They used the so-called GameGAN, a neural network model mimicking game engines through generative adversarial networks. The idea is that two competing neural networks – the generator and the discriminator – can learn how to replicate not just images or video but entire systems.
First of its kind: “This is the first research to emulate a game engine using GAN-based neural networks,” explained Seung-Wook Kim of Nvidia Research. “We wanted to see whether the AI could learn the rules of an environment just by looking at the screenplay of an agent moving through the game. And it did.”
Pac-Man turns 40: “We were blown away when we saw the results, in disbelief that AI could recreate the iconic PAC-MAN experience without a game engine,” Koichiro Tsutsumi of Namco Bandai added. Pac-Man just celebrated his 40th anniversary, and it’s safe to assume that his creators didn’t expect their work to be replicated by a state-of-the-art artifical intelligence less than half a century later.
