Atari has announced The Deer Hunter today, the game will feature the voices and likenesses of veteran actors Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken, who will reprise their respective roles as a couple of steel workers/sportsmen drafted to combat the Vietcong...only to be captured by the enemy and forced to play a deadly game to preserve their own lives. The game is currently being developed for next-generation consoles and PC by Men of Valor developer 2015.
To reflect the epic film's disparate settings, Atari is incorporating a variety of gameplay elements into the Deer Hunter. The game will begin as a hunting sim, with players assuming the role of an all-new character, one of De Niro and Walken's hunting pals in rural Pennsylvania. After bagging the appropriate number of virtual bucks, the Deer Hunter will segue into a first-person shooter set in Vietnam that will feature two-player co-op. Though Atari didn't want to provide any spoilers about the game's ending, it did say it would feature "an innovative online-enabled 'Russian Roulette' mode."
"The Deer Hunter is an unforgettable cinematic masterpiece," said Atari executive VP Lucien Conen in today's announcement. "It is our privilege to be working with [writer-director] Michael Cimino to adapt his vision of the outdoors and war into the medium of gaming."
As for the actors' involvement, rather than simply recycle lines from the movie verbatim, De Niro and Walken are currently recording all-new dialogue at 2015's Tulsa, Oklahoma studios. A representative of Atari mentioned to GameSpot News that the pair "really, really got into their roles again." In a totally unrelated story, heroin use, gunshot fatalities, and illegal backroom gambling in the surrounding area have risen 300 percent.
