At the press junket for the Speed Racer movie, where I interviewed Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci, they also had a demonstration of the Speed Racer video game. The Nintendo Wii version has the Wii remote plugged into a steering wheel that let you drive the cars on the Wachowski Brothers' movie-inspired tracks, bumping competitors and doing flips as in the movie. Warner Interactive producer Jeff Nacheaur gave us a personal demo of the game.
Crave Online: Does this wheel already exist for the Wii?
Jeff Nachbaur: Actually this is the Wii Wheel. It's something brand new. It comes out with Mario Kart and we're actually the first 3rd party to use the wheel, coming out I think two weeks after that. So yeah.
Crave Online: Is it just a plastic wheel with a slot for the remote?
Jeff Nachbaur: Yeah, it's basically a chassis. You just put the regular Wii remote inside of it. All it does is makes it a lot easier to play this kind of control scheme that's a lot more similar. The Wii remote will actually work without it but it's a little bit more awkward to hold it that way. We actually made it so you can use it without as well. You can just kind of hold it like this, just hold it flat.
Crave Online: Was there ever any thought to doing this for a different next gen system or was it obvious for the Wii?
Jeff Nachbaur: Oh yeah, we would love to have done it for a next gen system. The problem is the way movies work, by the time they get greenlit and they're moving forward we have so little time. So basically, we went to a developer who had done nontraditional racing games before. They already had existing technology so we just decided we were going to focus on one platform. Basically, we wanted to create a quality title so that was our strategy in order to get a quality title.
Crave Online: It seems tailor made for Wii.
Jeff Nachbaur: Well, because we knew we were a single platform, we kind of made all the controls specific. We are actually working on a PS2 version as well which will be coming out with the DVD. It's a younger demographic so PS2 is a good place for us to be.
Crave Online: The movie actually assigns powers to Speed's A button, B button, etc. Did that influence the controls?
Jeff Nachbaur: Well, actually, we don’t' have A and B buttons on the Wii so no. Obviously, that was an initial starting point. We're looking at it but the thing is, we don't focus on the rally racing and we don’t have gadgets. We're all about the arena racing that's in the movie, so because of that, that only had a minimal amount of influence. If we get to do a sequel, you'll probably start seeing stuff like that.
Crave Online: The game is set a year after the film. How does it build off the story of the movie?
Jeff Nachbaur: Actually, that's exactly why we set it a year ahead, because we wanted to kind of leave the story alone. We wanted to make an extension experience. We didn't want to recreate the film. We just wanted people like well, they saw the movie, it looks like fun to play the game. It looks like fun to race the car, looks like fun to do this, so we just tried to find the parts that we thought would be the most fun, and just made that the game. So it's all about racing. It's all about car fu and beating up your opponents on the track. We have a little bit of a story element. You can forge alliances with people and you have a rival on the track that seeks you out, but other than that…
Crave Online: Is that one of the pitfalls of movie games, that they try too hard to recreate the story of the movie?
Jeff Nachbaur: For some licenses, for some movies I think that works. The thing is, Speed Racer I don't think is defined by the story of the film. I think it's defined by the world and the characters. But you'll have something like 300 which is defined by the events. For something like this, the story is more like it's good for the drama but video games aren't quite as good as drama, so we try to focus on what video games are good at.
Mirror’s Edge ... 
