New Hollywood player pushes a different game

Perhaps it was the six-foot plastic Superman suspended overhead that made Jason Hall a little antsy.

But at a recent photo shoot, Hall, a 33-year-old former video game entrepreneur hired by Warner Bros. Entertainment to run its new video game business, could not stand still. He bounced up and down on the stool his overprotective publicist instructed him to stand on, stretching his 6-foot-7 frame to peer over the wall of the cubicle next door. He struck a tadasana pose from yoga, then raised his arms like a Greek warrior throwing a javelin. For good measure, he also did an impression of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Look, I'm just a guy," Hall said, imploring the photographer to hurry up. "I'm not Captain Business."

Not yet anyway. But Hall is currently the go-to guy at Warner Bros., which last year decided to re-enter the video game business for the first time since a much-publicized debacle with Atari 20 years ago. Recently, studio executives have looked at the fat profit margins of video games as a way to pad their bankrolls, hoping to capitalize on their companies' vast libraries by turning movies and television shows into lucrative games.

So far the strategy has not worked out that well. While there have been some successes, many movie-related games sell poorly, often because game makers are faced with either producing a substandard game to meet the film's opening release date or selling it after interest in the movie has fizzled.

As a result, some studios are taking a more direct financial and creative stake in the video game business. Warner Bros. has been the most aggressive, licensing film titles to publishers; co-publishing new movie-based games, including the upcoming "Batman Begins," a project with Electronic Arts due in June; and exploiting old franchises for games like "The Matrix Online," which was released to mostly lukewarm reviews.

And the studio hired Hall, who has shaken things up. Last year, he helped persuade Clint Eastwood to lend his voice and likeness to a game based on the "Dirty Harry" movies. More recently, Hall caused a furor among game makers when he said royalty fees would be cut if their games did not meet minimum quality standards.

"Everyone knows the quality of video games based on movies isn't very good," Hall said. "That accomplished two things immediately. The quality came up and it started a dialogue."

Hall's sensibilities are offbeat compared to Warner Bros.' buttoned-down corporate culture. But what Hall may lack in Hollywood savvy

he more than makes up for with seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurial flair and a management styled learned at the local multiplex, not business school. He said Spock from "Star Trek" was his model of executive grace under pressure, and that he admired Darth Vader's "get-it-done mentality."

To Kevin Tsujihara, Warner's executive vice president in charge of business development and strategy, that attitude is refreshing. "We did not bring him in because he knows a debit or a credit or he can do an acquisition of a game company," Tsujihara said. "We can do that. We need creativity. We need to make better games."

Hall was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1971 and moved to Los Angeles with his mother after his parents split up when he was a toddler. As a youngster, he preferred his Atari 2600 game console to practicing piano. With no father around, the heroes in video games became "fictitious role models, something I could look to," he said. In his neighborhood, "my options were the local gangs, the local gangs," he said, counting on his fingers. "That wasn't that interesting to me."

"I'm into the removal of fear. If people are fearful you get less brains thinking."

--Jason Hall, senior vice president, Warner Bros. Interactive

In 1988, Hall moved out of his mother's apartment and drifted through a series of random jobs--computer technician at Kinko's, licensed stockbroker and, later, a reservist in the Marine Corps. Through a series of jobs at software companies, first Broderbund, then Edmark, he met the gamers who would became business partners.

In 1994, they started Monolith in Seattle, helping Microsoft introduce a new graphics technology and making games for studios. Hall had a knack for showmanship and was named chief executive, colleagues said, because he liked to talk the most.

"He has a way of captivating people's attention, which has made him successful," said Brian Goble, Hall's former business partner. "Jason focuses all his energy on one thing, and that's his career."

Gary Kussman, the former chairman and an investor in Monolith, said Hall has "these ideas that come out of left field" and can be prescient. Nearly a decade ago, Hall wanted to advertise games in movie theaters, and, in 1998, he wanted to make online games, ideas Kussman resisted.

Hall's enthusiasm and eagerness also caught Tsujihara's eye. Monolith had grown from six to 130 people, but the founders were ready to sell. (Neither Hall nor Warner, the eventual buyer, would disclose the price.) Tsujihara said he hired Hall in part because he masterfully handled the relationship with the sometimes temperamental Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the Matrix movies.

Hall now manages a staff of 40 and is the go-between with

marketing and production executives at the studio, as well as filmmakers and partners like Electronic Arts. In other words, Hall is at the mercy of many demanding masters. Even getting a 30-second film clip of the Batmobile from nervous studio executives to include in the "Batman Begins" game took him months.

"It finally worked out after much hair-pulling," said Dan Romanelli, who heads the consumer products division.

More movies and games command shelf space at mega-retailers, and Warner Bros. sees that as an opportunity to breathe new life into old franchises. One way is by promoting new games alongside DVD releases of movies. In part to mollify actors wary of being involved in poorly made games, Hall insisted on the minimum-quality clauses in new game contracts.

Hall was particularly interested in developing a game around "Dirty Harry," the San Francisco police officer portrayed in a series of films by Clint Eastwood.

"Jason felt a lot of new games, like 'Grand Theft Auto,' were a rip-off of 'Dirty Harry,'" said Tsujihara.

But the young entrepreneur also had a lot to learn about corporate studio politics.

"Jason's natural reaction is to trust everyone," said Tsujihara. "I spent a lot of time with Jason, on making the transition."

Hall used to be freely accessible to writers, fans and fellow gamers. Now, in one major cultural shift, studio executives say Hall is rarely allowed to talk to outsiders unless he is monitored by a publicist. "You want to maintain that accessibility but keep him focused," Tsujihara explained. "You have so many hours in the day."

For now, Hall can only wait to see if the studio's crossover experiment--"Batman Begins"--is a hit. He has already owned up to a recent bout of anxiety.

"You work so long on a game and really you want people to like it," he said. But he said he also believed that level of anxiety was destructive. "I'm into the removal of fear. If people are fearful you get less brains thinking," he said. "The way to combat fear is you bring everyone together, you open yourself to hearing feedback. It's critical."

And then he eyed the two corporate publicists listening intently at his side. "I don't want people thinking we are running a nonprofit here," he said. "But this isn't just work, it's life."