‘Beyond Good And Evil 2’ & Ubisoft Find Partner In Joseph Gordon Levitt’s HitRECord

Video game publisher Ubisoft and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s creative collaborative platform HitRECord are partnering up and inviting the latter’s online community of artists to create assets for future video games, starting with Ubisoft’s multiplayer RPG title Beyond Good and Evil 2.

Gordon-Levitt appeared onstage today at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre with Beyond Good and Evil 2 senior producer Guillaume Brunier to invite artists of every type and skill to participate in Ubisoft’s Space Monkey Program and collaborate on content such as poster designs, radio ads and music that will appear in the game.

“This is the first time we’ve entered the video game space,” Gordon-Levitt said, “and the creative challenges are live now.” The creative challenges are various assignments for HitRECord’s online community to work on together.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 is a sequel to the cult 2003 game that followed Jade, an investigative journalist and martial artist who works with a resistance movement to reveal a planet-wide alien conspiracy. The sequel, which still is in development and working on a release date, is billed as taking place curing a golden age of piracy. In the game, players can create their own pirate captains in a futuristic world and recruit from a wide variety of humans and animal/human hybrids in forming crews. Here is the trailer that dropped today:

Gordon-Levitt’s LA-based HitRECord, which he started with this brother Dan in 2005, has created various multi-media projects including short films and songs with the input of an online community. People whose ideas are incorporated into fully completed projects ultimately are compensated, and HitRECord touts that it has paid close to $2M worldwide to social participants. HitRECord had a 16-episode variety TV series that showcased its projects on Participant Media’s Pivot channel (which went dark at the end of 2016). HitRECord on TV won an Creative Arts Emmy in 2014 for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Social TV Experience.

“Right from the start, we knew we wanted to involve our community in unprecedented ways,” said Michel Ancel, creative director of Beyond Good and Evil 2. “HitRECord is the perfect partner to collaborate with to create this expansive world by bringing our passionate communities together and bring it to life.”

Artists of all skill levels interested in contributing can head to hitrecord.org to finalize their participation – and link to their Space Monkey Program at hitrecord.org/bgegame. Participants will be able to add designs and music or build on pre-existing content within the site’s archives. Creative briefings and regular reviews from key members of the Beyond Good & Evil 2 development team will guide the process and then turn it over to the participants, who are encouraged to work with others on the platform. Creators will be credited and paid for their contributions based on item type, scope of work, and intention for its use. The Beyond Good and Evil 2 team will be reviewing pieces created and tagged “BGE2”.

Above you can watch Ubisoft’s E3 conference live.