Ghostbuster the video game

Ghostbusters 3 is still in the early stages of development. Rumors are flying around all over that everyone from the original cast is coming back (which is the only way to do it, really).

As long as Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Sigourney Weaver are in it and Ivan Reitman directs it, I think it will be fine.

But well before then -- in just about two weeks, actually -- Ghostbusters the video game will come out. And the New York Times has a great profile of the Ghostbusters franchise in advance of the new video game.

So should we be worried about the typical the-video-game-of-the-movie-nearly-always-sucks concerns (the same is true of books based on movies)? From the NY Times article:

Hoping to break with the decades-long litany of slipshod interactive movie tie-ins, Atari, the game’s publisher, has approached Ghostbusters: the Video Game as a major production in its own right. In a reversal of the traditional entertainment food chain, the game, to be released June 16, will come to market even as planning for the long-awaited third “Ghostbusters” film remains in the earliest stages. The expectation is that the game will both revitalize and expand interest in the franchise ahead of a new movie.

If their plan was to "revitalize and expand interest in the franchise ahead of a new movie" they would probably not release it three years ahead of when the movie is actually made.

So how involved were Ramis and Aykroyd (who wrote the first two Ghostbusters movies)? Well... kind of. But not as much as you might hear in the marketing.

“The crassest way I can put it is that they couldn’t have paid us enough to give it the time and attention required to make it as funny as a feature film," Ramis told the New York Times.