Gen Con Woes

 Con Report  19 Responses »
Feb 152008
 

Word is that Gen Con has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This comes on the heels of the news that Lucasfilm recently filed suit against the company over bills related to the latest Star Wars Celebration, which Gen Con put on last year.

This is not good news. I love Gen Con, and I love the people who run it. Peter Adkison, who owns the company with his wife Melissa, is a longtime friend, and this cannot be any fun for him.

However, it seems that the two recent announcements are closely related. The Star Wars Celebration was the first (I believe) without a new Star Wars film to help rouse the fanbase, and Gen Con likely lost money on it. Combine this with three years of trying to get Gen Con So Cal up and running, and you have some holes that have formed in this sturdy ship’s hull.

However, the core business of Gen Con Indy (the original and only in my heart) is reportedly solid, a good money maker on its own. Without the other shows draining Gen Con’s coffers, the company stands a good chance of turning itself around.

It’s possible that the Lucasfilm suit forced Gen Con into involuntary bankruptcy. The last time I checked, it only took three dedicated creditors to force this to happen, but there are ways to engineer such things if you’re determined. I’d guess that Gen Con would have preferred to settle the issue with Lucasfilm quietly, but that didn’t happen. Now they’ll get to negotiate a settlement in the open and with the help of a bankruptcy court instead.

Clearly, Peter (who founded Wizards of the Coast and sold the company to Hasbro) could pay this debt out of his own pocket if he wanted, but that’s why Gen Con is a corporation (an LLC, to be exact). One of the biggest reasons to incorporate a business is to insulate your personal assets from that of the business. Beyond your initial or continued investment in the company, it should be able to stand on its own. If it succeeds, the owners get to share in that success, but if if should fail or fall on hard times, creditors can only go after the assets of the corporation, not those of the owners too.

I’m hopeful that Gen Con will weather this storm and come out into sunny days soon. I’m not changing my plans to attend the show this summer—and every other summer to come.

Mutants Loose in Hollywood

 Mutant Chronicles  4 Responses »
Feb 152008
 
Mutant Chronicles

Mc PosterI got back from Hollywood last night after one of the smoothest trips I’ve ever had. The good people at Paradox Entertainment (particularly Fred Malmberg and Jay Zetterberg) flew me out for a preview screening of the upcoming Mutant Chronicles movie and supplemented that with a couple of excellent nights out.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m writing the novelization for the film, and I turned in the manuscript nearly a year ago. That was, of course, long before the film had been completed, and I worked entirely from the script, using my imagination and my long experience with the Mutant Chronicles games to bring it to life.

It’s no surprise that director Simon Hunter‘s film differed from the images in my head. As with most films, the story changed a bit during shooting and editing too, so there are some inevitable discrepancies between the movie and the script-based book.

To fix that, I watched the film twice. Paradox set up showings (for other business reasons than just helping out me) in a private screening room on the Sunset Strip, and I sat and took notes, tapping them out on my laptop as the film rolled on. Now I get to go back and polish the book until it more closely resembles the film. There aren’t all that many large differences to resolve, but being able to see the film means I can pay a lot more attention to descriptions of the people and places than I could before, and make them more accurate.

As for the movie, I loved it. I’m bound to be biased, of course, having worked on both this novel and for years on the games on which the film is based. But it looks great, the actors do a wonderful job, and there are some truly fantastic moments in it. I can’t wait until you all get to see it too.

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