Justin Timberlake and David Beckham don’t have any real-life beef with each other, but cartoony characters resembling the famous crooner and soccer player will face off – along with 16 other A-list impersonators – in the upcoming Wii boxing game “Ready 2 Rumble Revolution” from publisher Atari and developer AKI.
Besides the Timberlake and Beckham copycats, players can don boxing gloves as a lanky Brad Pitt ringer named Fight Clubber or a flabby John Travolta lookalike dubbed Fever Friction. Other characters resemble such famous faces as Sylvester Stallone, David Hasselhoff, James Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shaun White, Simon Cowell and Antonio Banderas.
“We went with a decent mix of mostly modern, mainstream people that I think much of the younger generation will recognize and know, but then we also went to the other end and grabbed characters that we think some of the older people will recognize as well,” said “Ready 2 Rumble Revolution” producer Todd Slepian of the game’s casting choices.
Unlike previous “Ready 2 Rumble” games, which only offered a handful of unlockable famous stand-ins, the producers opted to fill the ring with celebs for the series’ first outing on the Wii – although gamers will be able to create their own customizable boxers from scratch. Slepian insists the celebrity-inspired characters are meant as parodies, not clones.
“We wanted to reach out to a broader audience, make it a little bit more mass market and add an element of humour,” said Slepian. “All of these characters are funny and over the top. We thought it lent itself to the ‘Ready 2 Rumble’ brand. All of the old character parodies were received pretty well, so we figured we’d take it to the next level.”
On the Net:
www.atari.com/us/games/ready-2-rumble-revolution/wii
