Blitz Games Studios is probably best known for "Sneak King," the Burger King advergame where players provide characters with greasy fast food. But at the 3D Entertainment Summit in early December, Blitz Games CTO Andrew Oliver revealed the firm now has a higher purpose -- they have figured out how to enable stereoscopic 3D, on home gaming consoles with the Blitztech Engine.
We tracked down Andrew Olver to find out the how and why. In an in-depth interview, we found that Blitz will not only license the technology but will develop original content to spotlight stereoscopic 3D.
GameCyte: This is all available now to developers, these tools for stereo 3D? Or is it in ongoing development?
All the technology works, and we've obviously got a half-written game with it running in to prove that. It'll be out sometime, I'm not going to say when [laughs]. And I'm not going to tell you the title, either. But hopefully we can make an announcement soon.
GameCyte: Is it an original title, or is this something that's been licensed?
It's an original, I'll tell you that.
Oliver said the prospect of native stereoscopic 3D titles will be as momentous as when movies went from black-and-white to color. That's why the company is willing to develop the games themselves to prove the point. But there are several hurdles left:
Some of the PC monitors out there that say they're 3D physically don't plug into a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. Either they need a double connector, or they're not HDMI or DVI. And then some actually have strange modes, like the polarized monitors that have to run at a fixed resolution. If that resolution isn't one supported by the PlayStation 3, it will never work.
The biggest difficulty of making games in 3D -- and this is the big, big problem -- is the games must run in 1080p at 60 frames per second, because that's what this 3D TV standard has dictated.
One caveat: Since consoles must connect to the monitor over HDMI -- component won't do -- early Xbox 360s are ineligible.
Read how Blitz Games was first attracted to stereoscopic 3D, how they overcame their hurdles and much, much more in our full interview.
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