Marc Ecko wanted to adapt Macbeth for a videogame

1:00 PM on 11.30.2009   |   Nick Chester

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Speaking with Marc Ecko about his work with videogames a few months back, the outspoken entrepreneur fessed up to one rumor I had been hearing -- he'd at one point been trying to adapt a videogame version of a famous William Shakespeare tale. 

"I completely re-imagined Macbeth," he said after some hesitation and surprise, and then stopped short. "I don't want to give it away."

Ecko admits that like many projects, it barely survived its infancy, simply existing only as a pitch or early demo. Rumors had Ecko's adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy as a violent action title, where players would run around "cutting people's heads off." Visceral Games has recently received some flak for adapting part of another classic, Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, to videogames with next year's Dante's Inferno. 

"I don't live my life afraid of what other people think," he said when asked if he was worried about what reactions to a Macbeth videogame might be. "Our adaptation, I think, would have made it relevant to people who wouldn't have otherwise known about this great story. It's unfortunate, because a lot of people just don't know Macbeth."

"What, was it sacrilegious when Akira Kurosawa did it?" he asks, referring to 1957's Throne of Blood, a loose motion picture adaptation of Shakespeare's play.

Ecko's current project is about as far from a bloody action title as it gets -- he's working with publisher CDV to adapt a Nintendo DS brain-teaser title, I Heart Geeks, for a North American release.