Ubisoft doing Scott Pilgrim game

Ubisoft Montreal is to produce a videogame based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim comic books. The game will coincide with the release of a Scott Pilgrim film next year.

According to IGN, the game will be a side-scrolling beat-'em-up with manga-style graphics similar to the comics, and will follow the plot of the film and books.

In the comic series, Canadian twentysomething slacker Pilgrim must defeat the seven evil ex-boyfriends of his girl Ramona Flowers, a roller-blading Amazon delivery agent with the power to travel through subspace.

The books are saturated with a retro gaming aesthetic inspired by creator O'Malley's love of classic NES games - the covers feature pixel art, Pilgrim plays in a band called Sex Bob-omb, evil ex-boyfriends are defeated in a shower of coins, and there are references to series like Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda throughout.

Although the game licence is connected to the live-action film - being directed by Edgar Wright of Spaced and Shaun of the Dead fame - it was Ubisoft's sensitivity to the retro style of the books that won out, O'Malley told Comic Book Resources.

"Universal hooked up with a number of different publishers, and we ended up going with Ubisoft. We talked about having an old school video game feeling like the books," he said. "That's something we talked about with Universal, and Ubisoft has more to do with that idea, that aesthetic. We're happy about it."

O'Malley said it was "too early" to talk formats, but promised lots of content and references that couldn't fit into the film would make it into the game

"I don't know if some people know this, but there's this Ninja Turtles game that came out a couple of years ago based on the recent CGI film, and the Game Boy Advance version was really cool," O'Malley said. "A lot of the same people that worked on that worked on this game, so it should be cool.

"It's still in the really early stages, but we're talking about having lots of characters, lots of Easter Eggs for readers of the books – a lot of stuff that couldn't fit into the movie but is more suited to the game. That's what I'd like to see and what we're working on."

O'Malley has published five volumes of Scott Pilgrim to date. They feature expressive art, sharp dialogue, surreal humour and a delicious mix of down-to-earth character comedy and kung-fu superhero wish-fulfilment, and we'd warmly recommend them to everybody. More at the official Scott Pilgrim website.