With the long-awaited release of X-Men: The Last Stand on May 26th, the anticipation for X-Men: The Official Game is high. Released 10 days before the film, The Official Game is the latest in the X-Men videogame saga, following Activision hits such as Legends, Wolverine’s Revenge, Mutant Academy 2, Next Dimension and Reign of Apocalypse. Yet unlike the previous entries, which were based more on the general X-Men saga and comics, this one ties directly into the new film and furthers the plot and characters. Available on a slew of platforms (Xbox, PC CD-Rom, Xbox 360, PlayStation2, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube) it's sure to rattle the brains of many fans and set the fan community a-buzz, both human and mutant alike.

G4 had a chance to chat with Activision Associate Producer Chris Palmisano, he of X-Men: The Official Game production team, at E3 and ask him about what fans can expect from the game and give us some insight into the process of turning a movie into a videogame.

Tell me about the plot of X-Men: The Official Game.

On a fundamental level, the game tells the back-story of the new film, X-Men: The Last Stand. We worked really closely with Fox and Marvel and had really good exposure to early revisions of the script, and we realized there’s a tremendous transition between X-Men 2 and The Last Stand in terms of characters, villains, and the plot. That enabled us to make a really cool movie game.

How does the game relate to the movie?

The game really focuses on the individual storylines of Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Iceman, and they all play in differently in terms of the transition between X2 and The Last Stand. But as a movie game goes, it’s cool because if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll have a good idea as to what goes on and it foreshadows the plot, and shows a lot of the cool villains. And if you play afterwards, a lot of the stuff makes sense. For example, where did Multiple Man come from and where’s Nightcrawler? There’s a lot to talk about.

It seems like a lot of movie games take the title but don’t have a lot to do with the actual movie, whereas this one ties directly into the film...

We worked closely with Zack Penn, who wrote X2 and X3. He wrote our scripts. We also worked with Chris Claremont from Marvel. It gave us a really solid footing to make sure that we were totally fitting in with the timeline. It’s hard for developers sometimes to know what’s happening in the movie and what’s going on. If you work with the writers, it really gives you a leg up.

There’s a built in audience for movie games. Do you find that audience is clamoring for the game as much as they are the movie?

It’s hard for me to tell as someone that’s so close to the project. After you’ve worked on a game for over a year you wonder why anyone would ever want to play it! (LOL) No, seriously, one of the cool things about the movie is that it’s a very visual experience and people that enjoy it really want to get into the characters and experience it firsthand, and the game allows you to have a more interactive level of the movie experience.

How does this game stand up to other movie games?

For me, I’ve played a lot of different movie games and some have really resonated more than others. I always like to be able to play the characters as they are in the movie and be able to control them. If you have a good experience in the movie, then it’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it.” For us with Xbox 360, it came as a great jumping off point to really make our models look awesome. We worked with really great actors really closely. Even across all the platforms, it will maintain the real movie look.

Are the actors from the movies doing their characters voices in the game?

They all have different roles in the game. We have our three core characters, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Iceman, and we have Hugh Jackson, Shawn Ashmore and Alan Cumming. As far as the enemies go, we have a number of different enemies, too many to name off the top of my head. But the key characters are all there, like Patrick Stewart, Aaron Stanford, and all the others you'd want to see in the game.

Excellent.