James Cameron is known as an innovator. The Canadian-born filmmaker creates visually arresting movies that rely on visual effects: the killing machine and the creature in The Terminator and Aliens, the underwater environment of The Abyss, the seamless Titanic. With his latest project, the 3-D science-fiction movie Avatar, he has expanded into video games. Although his films have previously spawned game adaptations, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game is the first whose development saw the filmmaker get intimately involved.

Kevin Shortt is the lead scriptwriter for the Ubisoft-developed game, which was released on December 1. At a PlayStation Canada media event held in Toronto in October, Shortt told the Georgia Straight that Cameron was a great, “forward-looking” partner to work with. “He wanted the world to be bigger than the film,” Shortt said.

In early meetings with the Ubisoft development team, Cameron explained that he thought video games, as a medium, would be the perfect way to show more of Pandora, the moon on which the action of the film takes place. The appeal for the creative team at Ubisoft, Shortt said, was the opportunity to work with Cameron and the “incredibly beautiful” world he had created.

The game is set two years before the film. “We didn’t want to give away their story, but we got a chance to introduce the characters that are in the film,” Shortt said. That includes those played by Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Stephen Lang, and Giovanni Ribisi, all of whom voice their roles in the game.

At times, Cameron disagreed with what the Ubisoft team had come up with. But when the developers presented the story they wanted to tell, “He bought off on it entirely,” Shortt recalled. “He had given us so much information about the world, we stuck to the rules and he loved it.”

In a phone interview from Ubisoft’s Montreal studio, executive producer Patrick Naud told the Straight that Cameron trusted Ubisoft “in creating the best possible game” and enabled the company to do this by giving the developers access to everything the people working on the film had created. “Concept art, animation, 3-D models, pictures, specs, final scenes, rough scenes, layouts,” Naud explained. “We had almost all of the elements from the movie. We had access to everything, and access to everyone.”

Ubisoft needed to create vehicles so gamers could travel more easily around Pandora, so Cameron provided the concept artist from the film to assist the developers. After the filmmakers saw the ATVs and jeeps that had resulted, they brought the vehicles into the movie. “When I say we were treated as equals,” Naud said, “it’s the fact that they highly respected what we did.”

When Naud’s team pitched the idea of a Pandorapedia—so players could keep track of the world’s details—to Cameron, the filmmaker liked it so much he ended up writing a big part of the tome. The encyclopedia is included in the game. “He designed the whole world,” Naud said. “It’s massive.”