Yoostar Entertainment Group has a small but loyal following for its user-generated video business where you insert your own image into classic movie scenes. But now it is shifting into games and has hired game industry veteran Greg Fischbach as its chief executive.
Fischbach is a well-known figure in the video game industry as the former chief executive of Acclaim Entertainment, the company that brought the controversial and bloody fighting game Mortal Kombat to the world. Acclaim stumbled in its latter years and went out of business; Fischbach left the company five years ago and has focused on consulting, investing, and handling merger and acquisition transactions.
In an interview, Fischbach said he hoped to take Yoostar’s technology — which can insert your own image or that of your friends into movie scenes such as Casablanca’s ending — and adapt it for the social game market. Fischbach said the game isn’t yet announced, but it would likely be available for both game consoles as a retail game, as downloadable content for connected consoles, and on social networking sites such as Facebook.
The founder of New York-based Yoostar, Patrick Bousquet-Chavanne, will serve as co-chairman. He will serve alongside Fischbach in day-to-day executive functions.
Fischbach was co-founder and CEO of Acclaim Entertainment (after Acclaim went out of business in 2006, the unrelated company Acclaim Games took the rights to the name). He was president of Activision International from 1983 to 1986 and was a co-founder of the Entertainment Software Association and the Entertainment Software Rating Board in the mid-1990s. He had to do those latter two tasks because Mortal Kombat and other violent video games raised the ire of some members of Congress. And in doing so, he helped head off censorship of games.
Yoostar launched its PC-based Yoostar Movie Karaoke service last fall and users have created 10,000 videos. The audience is small because the process was fairly involved; you had to film yourself with a webcam using a green screen behind you so that your video images could be transferred onto the bodies of famous movie characters. On average, users upload two video clips.
Fischbach said the team of 30 people has now figured out how to adapt the service into a social game where users will share the experience with their friends. They call the new service a “social video game.” Yoostar has the rights to hundreds of classical movie scenes from major film studios. Yoostar is working with a major game developer to adapt the experience to video game consoles and it will show off the game at the E3 Expo in June.
Yoostar was founded in 2007. There are other services on the web that morph your face onto cartoon characters, such as Elf Yourself. But no one does exactly what Yoostar does. Investors include Emigrant Capital and Entertech. Funding amount has not been disclosed.
Fischbach said he was asked to invest in the company two years ago but it didn’t match his investment strategy. He kept in touch, joined the board, and now is assuming the top job.
[photo credit: Moral Kombat]
Check out a movie scene created by a Yoostar fan.