SEGA doing His Dark Materials

SEGA has done a deal with New Line Cinema and Scholastic Media to create games based on the films of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials book trilogy.

For the moment that's all we know - there's no word on developer, target formats or release date, although the first film in the trilogy is due out in November 2007.

So we might as well talk about that. Called The Golden Compass (although we all know it as Northern Lights), it'll star Nicole Kidman as the intoxicatingly toxic Mrs Coulter and James "Daniel Craig" Bond as Lord Asriel, although it's child actor Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra Belacqua who's the real star of the story. The film has a $150 million budget.

Pullman's first book tells the pre-pubescent Lyra's story as she travels from Jordan College in Oxford, where she's grown up as an orphan, up to the arctic in the hope of rescuing her friend Roger from the "Gobblers". And for those of you tuning out at this point, bear in mind that "Gobblers" is short-hand for "the General Oblation Board", a part of the church that basically rips children in half to further its own understanding of something called "Dust". Anybody? No? Dust.

The second and third books meanwhile take us off in a different direction, and it'd be unfortunate to spoil any of that for those of you who haven't read them. We like them around here though, and it'll be interesting to see how SEGA does in adapting them. It doesn't sound like the best idea in the world, but then neither did Lord Asriel's, and you should see how far his gets him.