Spector said he was leery about meeting with Disney to pitch the concept, since he was convinced that they wouldn't be interested.

"I went into the meeting room, pitched them my stuff, and sure enough I was right. The guys started texting in the middle of the meeting. I was convinced they were not interested," he said.

Billed as an adventure game in the style of Myst featuring 360-degree panoramics and more than 13 hours of video, it stars a good chunk of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 cast as well as actor Peter Graves in his final role.

The story is set 300 years in the future, with the main character awakening from a lengthy hibernation. MST3K creator Joel Hodgson stars as the commander, with Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff and J. Elvis Weinstein also filling roles. Graves, who was a frequent targets thanks to appearances in films such as Attack of the Eye Creatures, serves as the narrator.

From August 23 through September 4 of 2010, 1UP's Matt Leone and Richard Li left the office and hit the road for our first ever Cross Country Game Tour, visiting the hottest game development studios in the 48 contiguous United States.

With camera in tow, we took an inside look at Bungie's new home, met the actual hand model from the Left 4 Dead cover, got some insight into Thatgamecompany's upcoming Journey, ate tacos with Junction Point's Warren Spector, manhandled id Software's Emmy award, and lots more!

Executive producer Casey Hudson sat down with IGN to discuss the player stats for Mass Effect 2, revealing some fascinating discoveries about user behavior. For example: Players skipped just 15 percent of conversations in BioWare's sci-fi sequel, with a majority of those skips occurring on the game's hub worlds rather than during climactic story moments.

"If we found that 80 percent or 90 percent of the lines were being skipped, we would have to reevaluate the work that we were putting into the digital acting," Hudson explained.

He says he didn't want to let players know who developed it, or what it was. Instead, Blow kept his distance and took the occasional glance to see how players were doing. "Happily, the game worked very well -- despite the fact that the visuals are still in an early prototype stage. People tended to play for a long time, and they liked what they played." With his social experiment behind him, Blow says all that's left now is to "finish the game."

It's an interesting way to give a game a real-world test, but Blow might have a hard time doing it again. Now that word is out, the next convention he attends is sure to have eagle-eyed players looking for his brainchild.

Officers of the Washington State Patrol say they found evidence of drug use in the other vehicle, and its occupants are known offenders. The two rear passengers of the vehicle, Jacob Quistorf and Francis Malloy, were killed. The driver, Jordyn Weichert and front passenger, Samantha Bowling, are alive. Weichert is being charged with vehicular assault, and Bowling is hospitalized with a pelvic injury while being investigated for the same charges, as she may have taken the wheel.

"At the very last second [Brian] braked really hard and turned right so that he would be put in the path of the SUV and not me and the baby, and that is the only thing that saved us both," said Erin Wood. "I am not going to waste the gift he gave us." She called her husband "the most amazing warm-hearted man you would ever meet who loved his job, loved his family, and was just my rock."

Both of the veteran actors have been in countless movies. Oldman is most known recently from his roles in The Dark Knight and The Book of Eli. In Black Ops, he'll be reprising his role as Viktor Reznov from World at War. Harris, meanwhile, is recognized for his roles in A History of Violence and Apollo 13. He'll be playing Jason Hudson, a CIA operative. David S. Goyer has written for both of the recent Batman films, Blade, and the upcoming Superman: Man of Steel.

"Oldman, Harris and Goyer are considered some of the finest talents and they perfectly complement Call of Duty: Black Ops' ambitious and immersive single-player experience," said Treyarch head Mark Lamia in the press release. "Their contributions have helped us to push the boundaries of our story telling and character development far beyond anything we have ever attempted before in the franchise."

Develop reports that the property has been purchased by an anonymous American company, with no word on how the purchase will affect the 23 developers currently working on the game. One of the more optimistic scenarios has the American company temporarily hiring the Dundee-based staff in order to finish the project, but they may also opt to purchase the build and the IP and finish it themselves.

APB remains up for purchase, though interest in the sandbox MMO has reportedly been weaker than it was for Project MyWorld. According to numbers released by Begbies Traynor, appoximately 130,000 registered users play the game an average of four hours per day.

Responding to a report by Shacknews, founder Brad Wardell posted on the game's official forums, "Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off."

Wardell said that the layoffs are the first since the company's migration from the OS/2 market in 1998, and commented that it "sucks for all of us to lay off anyone."

When he wasn't busy discussing the return of Duke Nukem, Gearbox co-founder and CEO Randy Pitchford spent some time at PAX revealing that, around the release of the Borderlands Game of the Year edition (scheduled for October 12), Gearbox will update the game to increase the level cap by eight, bringing it to 69. They decided on an increase of 8 because they didn't want it to be too low, or as high as the 11-level increase that the General Knoxx brought.

Joystiq reports that Pitchford explained that Gearbox opted to make the increase a free update instead of including it in the Claptrap DLC because then "you'd have to buy every previous DLC." Also included in the free update will be a rebalancing of the original game to cater to the new level cap. Given that these are the sort of things you might expect to see in a premium DLC release, it's nice to see Gearbox instead release them to fans for free.