Skip to main content

Which Harry Potter video games have approval and oversight from J.K.Rowling?


There are a ton of Harry Potter video games out right now, movie games, LEGO games, and others. Which games, if any, have had input by J.K. Rowling, and/or had nods of approval?



Answer



Guest443 already covered "Book of Spells", so I'm not going to discuss it here.


It appears as though Rowling had quite a bit of creative input on the movie tie-in games. In an interview with The Courier Mail, reported by a fansite (the original article has been taken down), Derek Proud, a producer on the Chamber of Secrets game, had this to say:



"Indeed much of the stuff that we have put in the game which is outside the bounds of the fiction had to be put to [Rowling] so that she could approve it and make sure she was happy with the way we were shaping the Harry Potter universe.


"Rowling seemed to be very happy that we were growing her fictional world and so she gave us a whole lot of extra fictional material which she hadn't used in the books to date.



"For example there is a new creature in the game, called a Gytrash, and it is something she created specifically for us,"



Similar comments were made by Chris Roberts, lead designer on the Order of the Phoenix tie-in game, in an interview with MTV. According to him, Rowling gave them special information, feedback on characterization, and officially canonized some of their inventions (the rules for Gobstones is the example given):



[W]hen the EA team working on the game in London wanted to give players the ability to play wizard games like Gobstones and Exploding Snap, she did more than just say, "OK."


Rowling's books mentioned the games but didn't spell out exactly how Harry and friends play them. Roberts and team dreamed something up. "We wrote the rules up for all these games, sent them off to J. K. Rowling, and she went, 'Yeah, OK, those are the rules,'" he told MTV News during a visit to EA UK's Guildford, England, studio just outside of London. "It's kind of cool. We got to make all the rules."


Roberts is the game designer on the sixth EA "Potter" game, the fifth based on Rowling's books and associated movies (the other game was all about the Harry Potter sport of Quidditch). At this point, Rowling has some confidence in the developers. But they can't get away with everything. "She has written documents for us, explaining how certain things work, why you shouldn't do certain things that we're not supposed to say because they're secret," Roberts said.


And she has put her foot down when need be. Roberts and the team came up with a mission in the game that would have Harry's classmate Neville Longbottom sabotaging a clock tower to get back at Hogwarts professor Dolores Umbridge. "We got this feedback from her saying, 'I really like the mission, but I don't think Neville would do that. I think it would be Dean Thomas. He's much more likely to do it.'" They switched the mission to Dean.



Although I haven't been able to find specific references to other video games based on the movies, it seems likely that Rowling had a similar level of creative input in their development.



Additionally, Rowling confirmed on her website1 that she wrote all of the information for the Famous Wizard Cards that appeared in the Chamber of Secrets video game:



Q: Did you actually write the information that ended up on the Famous Wizard cards?


A: Yes, I wrote the information on the original Famous Wizard cards. As you have noticed, a few of them have now popped up on the 'Wizard of the Month' cards on my website desk.



Regarding the LEGO Harry Poter series, Inside Mac Games interviewed Traveller's Tales Game Director Jonathan Smith in 2011. He was pretty vague, but he did indicate that some agent of Rowling (if not Rowling herself) provided feedback and input on the game (emphasis mine):



Q: What input did you get from JK Rowling and any of the folks involved with the movies?


A: JK Rowling has created the most amazing world, and we are at every moment very much aware of the debt that we owe her. I think that dedication comes through in every detail of LEGO Harry Potter, where the team, as fans, strain every sinew to be true to the rules of the wizarding world and those wonderful characters. In this task, they're extremely well supported by many experts at J K Rowling's agency and Warner Bros., whose feedback and input was nothing less than invaluable.




The interview was explicitly regarding the first game in the series, LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4, but it seems likely that this would also hold true for the sequel.


However


According to the Harry Potter Lexicon, no information in the video games is technically allowed to be called Canon:



I have since learned from [Wizards of the Coast - developers of the Harry Potter trading card game] and from the folks at Electronic Arts [producers of the movie tie-in video games] that companies which create Harry Potter information are forbidden by contract to claim to present "new Harry Potter information." In other words, they can't say that their product is canon, even if it is by our definition.



Whether you consider this information to be canon is really up to you.



1 The page is no longer available on Rowling's site. The provided link is courtesy of the Wayback Machine


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...
Post a Comment
Read more

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.
Post a Comment
Read more

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...
Post a Comment
Read more

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...
Post a Comment
Read more