Duncan Jones: 'Warcraft will right the wrongs of game movies'

When he was a child growing up in the 1980s, Duncan Jones would often stay up through the night, drawing maps on graph paper of places he’d only ever visited inside a computer screen. His father, David Bowieviewed his son’s arcane video game obsession with suspicion. “Like any parent he would say, ‘Why won’t you just get out of the house and play outside?’” Jones recalls.

Zowie, as he was known at the time, spent much of his early life on tour with his father. A peripatetic child, even one cushioned by the comforts of a rock star lifestyle, has to find home somewhere. For Jones, it was the video game worlds into which he disappeared each day. “Games have always presented an opportunity to escape,” he says. “But they are also an opportunity to go somewhere that you come to know well.”

So when, in 2013, Legendary Pictures approached Jones with the offer to direct Warcraft: The Beginning, a film based on World of Warcraft, one of the highest-grossing (and, until recently, most popular) online video games, it was a straightforward decision. “Here was a unique opportunity to take a game that I knew well and loved and try to craft something that would invite an audience to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to give people a sense of why so many people play and care about the game.”


Launched in 2004, the title popularised the so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing game, where players quest together across the internet, fighting monsters and, in many cases, forging enduring friendships with other players that spill into the world on the other side of the screen. Jones’s film will focus on two sides of a sprawling interspecies conflict, inspired by the game, and the story of Garona Halforcen, played by Paula Patton, a woman whose loyalties are split between the two sides.


A licensed blockbuster with a multitude of anxious stakeholders who hope that it will grow into a trilogy franchise is an entirely new proposition for the 44-year-old director of indie award-winner Moon and time-shanking thriller Source Code. Jones is undeterred by the challenge, and by the low regard in which most video game movie adaptations are held.


“I love games and I feel they’ve been sold short shrift in films so far,” he says. “It’s my generation’s opportunity to right that wrong.” Jones points out that in recent years comic book movies have enjoyed a “renaissance” of commercial and critical success. “There is no reason why video game-based movies shouldn’t be able to do the same thing.”


Jones has some personal experience of video game design. In 1999, David Bowie contributed to the story and soundtrack of sci-fi adventure The Nomad Soul, and made two cameo appearances. Bowie asked his son for feedback. “It was an interesting game,” says Jones, “but, you know, it’s always a little awkward when you’re playing a video game and then a giant version of your dad comes along.”


After graduating from film school in his 20s, Jones struggled to establish himself as a film director and spent 18 months at a London-based game studio where he worked as an assistant designer for Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence maven who now works on Google’s clandestine brain project. It was during that time he became a regular visitor to Azeroth, World of Warcraft’s fictional universe.


It is a decade since the film of the game was originally announced, with Sam Raimi as director. World of Warcraft was close to its most populous; in 2008 it accounted for 62% of the global subscription-based video game market. 12 million players paid a monthly subscription to reside in Azeroth (more than live in Greece, Portugal or Belgium.) There has, however, been something of an exodus in recent years as players have moved on to new pastures such as Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends. Last week World of Warcraft’s publisher, Blizzard, announced that only 5.5 million remain in the game today (a population that is still comparable to Finland).

Jones, who replaced Raimi as the film’s director in 2012, is not worried about the drop-off in the game’s audience. Nor is he concerned that the fantasy quest that underpins its narrative is one with which every Tolkien fan is wearily familiar. Rather than telling a straightforward tale of good versus evil, Jones has instead opted to find heroes on each side of the conflict. “The protagonists on each side are noble and empathetic,” he says. “They have reasons for doing what they’re doing that we understand. Both the humans and the orcs present rich cultures in their own right, with people you care about and people who are obnoxious.”

Stylistically, the film also distinguishes itself from, say, Lord of the Rings’s New Zealand mountain ranges, or Game of Thrones’s Northern Ireland vistas, with a far smaller world. “In the game you travel from one area to another fairly quickly,” says Jones. “You move from fields of wheat to lush forests and the shift is immediate. We wanted to get across the idea that space is limited.”

Before Warcraft comes out, Jones is trying to squeeze in a pet project called Mute, an indie science fiction movie about a speechless bartender searching for his missing partner in a cyberpunk city. This may be Jones’s last opportunity to do such work for a while – if Warcraft: The Beginning is successful, two more will follow. Jones shows no regret at the prospect of being creatively tied up for the foreseeable future.

“You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story. Be it a video game, comic book or cheque book, the question always is: what story do you have to tell?”

UK maker of Candy Crush bought by US's Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn

King Digital Entertainment, the British creator of the hit smartphone game Candy Crush Saga, has been bought for $5.9bn (£3.8bn) in a deal that will mean a payday of more than $1.2bn for co-founders Mel Morris and Riccardo Zacconi.

King is being acquired by Activision Blizzard, the US video game maker behind World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. The US group will pay $18 in cash for each King share – 16% more than the UK company’s closing price on Monday – in the biggest takeover in the British tech sector since Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in an ill-fated £7bn deal in August 2011.

Morris, the former chairman who left the company last year and is now owner of Derby County FC, has an 11.3% stake in King worth $666m at the $18 price. Zacconi, the chief executive, stands to bank $561m, and will stay on at the company. The deal will also make cash multimillionaires of other top executives.

Activision Blizzard’s games are played on consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation – and it said buying King would give it a place in the rapidly growing mobile games market.


It added that 60 % of King’s players were female, and that the combined company would have more than 500 million monthly active users across the world.

King floated on the New York Stock Exchange in March last year with a valuation of almost $8bn, making it the most valuable British business of the tech craze. Candy Crush had become wildly popular, racking up a billion plays a day on smartphones for the company, based in London’s West End.

But the confectionery-themed game, in which players must make lines of sweets disappear from a grid by lining up three or more of the same colour, was no longer a top 10 download at the time of flotation. King’s shares fell on their first day of trading as traders decided it was a one-product company, even though the business has 200 games.

The game still makes up about a third of King’s revenues and the shares have never got back to the $22.50 they were sold for. The sale to Activision Blizzard means those who bought at the time of flotation have made a loss.

The flotation made multimillionaires on paper of the company’s leadership team, including Morris, but their fortunes were tied up in shares. The British entrepreneur used his wealth to become the sole owner of Derby County, his local football club, in September after selling almost 2% of King.

At the time of the flotation, Morris’s stake had a paper value of about $875m. Chief operating officer Stephane Kurgan and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson will receive $150m and $309m respectively.

Zacconi and his team will run King as a separate business within Activision Blizzard. He said: “We will combine our expertise in mobile and free-to-play with Activision Blizzard’s world-class brands and proven track record of building and sustaining the most successful franchises, to bring the best games in the world to millions of players worldwide.”
Sweet returns

The takeover is the second time Morris, 59, has made millions from the sale of a technology business. The self-made tycoon left school at 16 and by 20 he was working as a management consultant. After a spell in the US, Morris, moved back to his home town of Derby.

Already a serial entrepreneur with a hardwood flooring company and a Spanish property business, in 1998 he turned his matchmaking agency into an internet dating site, uDate, the sale of which netted him £20m four years later.

Morris spent some of that money on a stake in Derby County, later sold, and part of it on establishing King Digital. He was persuaded to invest by Zacconi, who had worked at uDate. Toby Rowland, the son of the Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland, who helped run the dating site, also put money into King.

Now Morris has bought all of Derby County. He acquired 22% of his boyhood club in May last year after the Championship play-off defeat to Queens Park Rangers.

Morris, worth £400m according to the Sunday Times Rich List, stood down as chairman of King after its flotation but kept a stake of about 12%, most of which he has kept.

Zacconi is an Italian former management consultant who joined the digital industry during the dotcom boom of the late 90s. He missed out on a potential fortune when Spray, the Swedish web portal he worked at, delayed its flotation and the dotcom bubble burst. At the sale price of $18 a share for King, his stake is worth $561m.

Knutsson cofounded Spray, where he met Zacconi. He claims to have designed most of King’s worst games but he struck gold when Candy Crush emerged from his Stockholm studio. He banks $309m at the announced sale price.

Kurgan, who is Belgian and has an MBA from France’s elite Insead, joined King from Tideway, a data-centre management business. His stake is worth approximately $150m.