Announced for the end of 2023, Tintin signs his return to video games, almost 11 years after the adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s film, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. This time, the most famous comic reporter is going to investigate in Egypt and beyond in Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh, a faithful adaptation of the 4th self-titled album designed by Hergé.
And this new adaptation of the comics in videogames, we owe it as expected to Microids, the French publisher that has specialized in going from 2D boxes to pixelated 3D (Asterix and Obelix, Blacksad, The Marsupilami, The Bluecoats, The Smurfs, etc.). Boarding Tintin was not an easy task. Because behind the tassel and its 94 springs, an infernal war machine is hidden, with 24 discs on the clock and more than 260 million comics sold worldwide. A hero adored by a large community of fans, and a hero loved by Tintin Imaginatio (ex-Moulinsart), the rights holder.
“Tintin Imaginatio reviews everything and they’re right,” admits Gianni Molinaro, game producer at Microids. “They have the knowledge and you can’t even imagine how much they know. It is important for Pendulo, the study that brought the pharaoh cigars, and also for Microids. They supervise very kindly and we listen to them”. A true “temple guardian” who has been overseeing the video game birth of his still young and handsome Tintin for three years.
try to please everyone
Present in animated movies, cartoons, objects of all kinds, Tintin has had very little opportunity to flourish in video games. It must be said that giving a character frozen for eternity a look and playability in miniatures is not necessarily easy. “We were well received by Tintinófilos after the revelations of the first elements and the trailer”, celebrates Gianni Molinaro. “You can’t necessarily please everyone. Not even Spielberg’s Tintin had been liked by everyone. But we try to do our best to please as many people as possible so that they find the characters and items they imagined.
And the teams at the Madrid studio went to great lengths to transcribe Hergé’s work as faithfully and accurately as possible on this journey through Egypt, Arabia and India. “We respect Hergé’s work, but we also wanted to bring it to life in a little different way,” says Stéphane Longeard, CEO of Microids. “Péndulo transcribed both the physical and psychological characteristics of the characters. Comics took shape in another way, closer to us today.”
Tintin Reporter: Pharaoh Cigars he strives to offer the same variety of environments and actions in his video game adventure as in the comics. “It is a video game adaptation that will result in an adventure game, infiltration actions, exploration, and many interactions with characters that we tintinophiles know very well,” lists the game’s producer. of gameplay or environment the report on the side of the Little Twenty of Tintin who will narrate his adventures to his editor.
In the few game sequences that we were able to address, we found the same scenes as those in the comics, but animated. The opportunity to embark on a chase on the ship’s pontoon to help Tintin catch a loose leaf and thus meet Professor Siclone, help the journalist by exploring a temple in which he must solve mini-puzzles to escape, or test your ability to pilot a plane, chased by enemies in a canyon. Diversity of games to satisfy all players, simple enough with simple buttons to press to more complicated in dexterity when it comes to flying the plane over the mountains.
The first game in a long series.
Visually quite polished in these first images, the game is also a faithful tribute to the work of the Belgian designer who died 40 years ago. “You can’t just transcribe the comics as they are. There are elements that are in a single box, which implies having to enlarge them, enlarge them in a certain way. For example: a plane that flees in the comic, these are some boxes. There we are going to lengthen it so that it becomes a much more rhythmic action sequence, much more fun with dialogues and events that obviously do not exist in the comics”, acknowledges Gianni Molinaro, who argues that it is a much more immersive experience for the Players have the feeling of really embodying Tintin and Snowy during the ten hours that the game will last.
Premiering in the fall of 1934, the comic strip is also marked by its time, the interwar period. The Pyramids, the opium that devastates everything and its traffickers that Tintin, the maharajas, extravagant archaeologists or the meanest of all, Roberto Rastapopoulos run after. Sometimes it was necessary to adapt some elements to also comply with the PEGI ratings of video games and ensure that tintin it is still a game for the general public. References to alcohol, tobacco or the like are not expected. “These are elements that can be problematic, but they don’t necessarily imply that we change the course of the game itself, which we had designed with secondary characters. This can even sometimes give the latter more thickness. We are going to offer them more dialogue, more space in the story where perhaps they had only four boxes and a few lines in the comics, ”he sums up.
pharaoh cigars promises to be a game “for everyone”, fans or newcomers to the world of Tintin. It is perhaps even the latter that the game will address the most, just to introduce a new hero, known to his parents or grandparents who will also be happy to accompany them, controller in hand, to discover him. Tintin wants to make the leap into the 21st century without refusing to be modern or make his revolution at the risk of isolating himself from his fans, but rather with pixels to show a new facet of his eternal youth. And Microids already plans to make him continue his adventures. The seduction operation is launched during a few games.
Source: BFM TV
