When a blockbuster movie -- "King Kong," for example -- is spending a giant-ape-sized budget to hype its release, it's a sure bet there's a video game publisher enjoying the ride on its sizeable marketing coattails. That's a big reason, of course, why highly anticipated movies are licensed in the first place.

What then possesses game publishers to snap up the rights to, say, a four-year-old action/drama TV shows whose small-screen marketing budgets pale in comparison to their big-screen brethren?

In the case of both "24" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" -- both of which began in the 2001-2002 TV season and are now about to be released in video game versions -- the answers are simple: Both have large, devoted fan bases; both appeal to that elusive middle-aged, mass-market demographic; and, most importantly, both are proven successes.

The challenge, say publishers, is creating games that retain the look-and-feel of the TV shows while at the same time generating the great gameplay that gamers seek. How they approach that goal varies depending on the genre of the show involved.

This week we focus on "24" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," two action-based games which forgo networked gameplay to focus on strong lead characters -- and which share a chance to give the bad guys the third degree. Next week, we'll look at games based on two reality shows -- "Fear Factor" and "The Apprentice" -- where the challenge to developers and publishers involve racing to market to keep up with the shows.


"24: The Game"

The excitement of Fox "24" is its "real-time" approach to action-suspense; each week's one-hour-long show represents another hour in the hectic day of counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). As the digital clock ticks off the minutes toward each episode's cliffhanger ending, Bauer has a diminishing amount of time to save the nation from the worst fates imaginable.

According to producer Tim Hall, the trick was to translate that sort of mounting tension from TV to the PlayStation 2 third-person shooter scheduled for release in February. Hall is the producer of "24: The Game" at 2K Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software, whose Rockstar subsidiary scored big with "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." Development on "24: The Game" is taking place at Sony Computer Entertainment's Cambridge Studio in the UK.

"We're going beyond the usual holiday release season and taking that extra time to make sure the quality is up to par," Hall notes. "There's a preconceived notion that licensed games are crap, that with Hollywood-based games you just take the characters and slap them into an existing engine and go. We've been in development for two years now and we've got the full cooperation of everyone on the show -- from its writer [Duppy Demetrius] who wrote our story, its composer [Sean Callery], and the leads [including Keifer Sutherland, Elisha Cuthbert, and Carlos Bernard] who lend their likenesses and voiceovers. We want to make this not only a really great game, but a full '24' experience so that, when you see it, there'll be no mistaking that it's done in the style of the show."

While Hall is keeping the game's plot under wraps, it takes place between the second and third seasons of the TV show, right after Bauer foiled an attempted coup against the new U.S. president and defeated a plot by a militant terrorist group to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles.

"You don't need to be a fan of the show to understand what's going on in the game," notes Hall, "but if you've watched the other seasons, you'll recognize the characters and the back story. And we even fill in a lot of the gaps that people have questioned. For instance, hardcore viewers have wondered how the president recovered, and why Jack's daughter Kim was suddenly working at the Counter Terrorist Unit. All the answers are covered in the game."

It's not clear what earned the game its "M" (17 and older) rating -- whether it's the gunplay, the blood, or the replication of Bauer's somewhat aggressive interrogation techniques, but Hall says it's all an integral part of the game.

"There is a mechanic in the game where the player, as Jack Bauer, tries to pry information out of the bad guys and you have a certain amount of time to get it out of them," he explains. "Depending on how you ask the questions, you can either stress the person out or he may shut down on you."

In order to extend gameplay to approximately 14 hours, Hall says that "24: The Game" goes beyond action to include challenging puzzles and several driving sequences. And much of it is presented in the familiar breakneck, split-screen style used in the show, including the familiar digital countdown timer.

"We have over 100 missions which are broken down into time segments, and they need to be completed within a specific amount of time or you fail that level," he says.

What the game doesn't have is multiplayer action or an online component, mainly because the developers didn't find it true to the spirit of the TV show.

"Most of the time, '24' is not about Jack Bauer commanding a squad in order to complete the mission; it's about Jack Bauer in solo action," Hall says. "So including multiplayer didn't make a lot of sense to us."

Hall notes that, with enough sales, it is likely this will be the birth of a "24" franchise. In fact, he says, one of the main reasons the decision was made to create the game four years after the launch of the TV show was that its fan base has grown steadily.


"Law & Order: Criminal Intent"

Legacy Interactive has a long history of creating games from the original "Law & Order" TV series, having built "Law & Order: Justice Is Served," "Law & Order: Double Or Nothing," and "Law & Order: Dead On The Money." This time out, the Los Angeles-based publisher/developer aimed to do a game based on another show in the L&O franchise.

"It's ironic that we chose to do 'Criminal Intent' because, at the time, 18 months ago, it was doing very well in the Nielsens. That was pre-'Desperate Housewives' which is now head-to-head with 'Criminal Intent' in the time slot," notes producer Craig Brannon.

Regardless, Brannon says "Criminal Intent," which is scheduled to be released for PC-only in two weeks, is designed for fans of the show as well as for people who enjoy a good mystery or adventure, "because it doesn't really assume any prior knowledge of game playing. We're really trying to be as broad as possible."

The adventure game, which is being distributed by Vivendi, took 18 months to build rather than the 12 months the previous "Law & Order" games required.

"That's because we chose to build an entirely new engine to take advantage of the TV show's strengths," says Brannon.

He is referring to the very strong persona of the show's lead character, Detective Robert Goren (played by Vincent D'Onofrio), whose crime-solving prowess spearheads the series. The game was designed with a third-person point of view enabling the gamer to not only play as Goren but to see him on screen. In earlier "L&O" games, the player became an unnamed and unseen detective.

"Criminal Intent" is fully licensed, right down to the TV show's familiar soundtrack chime. Brannon's team worked closely with producer Dick Wolf's Wolf Productions, and two of the show's stars -- D'Onofrio and Jamey Sheridan (as Goren's boss, Capt. James Deakins) -- contributed their voices and likenesses. To capture the look of the show, the developers used floor plans and reference photography to recreate the look of the Major Case Squad offices. And one of the original writers from the show's first season, who is no longer with the series, created the plot and dialogue.

"The script itself was a major project, much bigger than anything anyone would write for a TV show," notes Brannon. "That's because it needed to include so many branching possibilities: all the correct and incorrect choices the gamer can make, all the relevant witnesses and the red-herring witnesses, all the evidence and lab results. Instead of creating a one-hour TV show, you're building a game with 20 hours of gameplay. The end result is a script that runs about 500 pages."

Like "24," there are no multiplayer or online components which, according to Brannon, would have required a much more extensive development schedule. "Besides," he notes, because of their puzzle-like nature, most adventure games are single-player only."

In "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," gamers are presented with three murder cases -- which is the reason the game's rating was bumped up to an "M" -- and they choose which order they intend to solve them. Each begins at the crime scene where Detective Goren is briefed on the basics of the crime. The rest of the game involves collecting evidence, determining what is relevant, interviewing witnesses, sending evidence to the crime lab, conferring with Capt. Deakins, getting warrants and, of course, interrogating suspects.

"The level of violence is pretty much the same as the TV show," notes Brannon, "which is to say that there isn't any. You don't see anyone get killed. But there are multiple dead bodies, one for each of the three cases, and then there's a bonus case in which one of the murderers who you've caught ends up being killed, and solving that crime becomes your fourth case."

Fans of the show know that Goren's specialty is in the interrogation room where he gets inside the suspect's mind and slowly breaks his will, getting him to confess. In the game, players are able to select a style of questioning -- perhaps empathetic, straightforward, flattering, deceptive, or confrontational -- depending on which one might elicit the most information. A status meter indicates how the interrogation is going; if it turns red, the witness will refuse to continue.

"We've even created what we call a Criminal Profiler on Goren's laptop," says Brannon. "As you collect evidence, you submit it to the profiler to determine what sort of person would have committed that crime. We worked with a real-life forensics expert who's done consulting work with various TV shows to tell us what kind of evidence we should use and what that would indicate. For example, finding rubber gloves at the scene might mean that the murder had been premeditated because the killer planned to bring the gloves with him."

At a time when the budgets of some video games climb as high as $10 million and even $20 million -- with teams of over 100 developers -- "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" was built on a relatively modest budget of "slightly under $1 million" with 15 developers.

Paul "The Game Master" Hyman was the editor-in-chief of CMP Media's GamePower. He's covered the games industry for over a dozen years. His columns for The Reporter run exclusively on the Web site.