A leading production exec at animated movie studio Pixar has praised gaming’s evolution – and admitted that the quality of visual technology is “catching up” with cinemas.

However, Ralph Eggleston, production designer behind Pixar’s upcoming movie, Wall-E, added that video games still lacked a “strong narrative story” – and predicted that there may never be the market for one to emerge.

“I’ve seen games catching up with us,” he told Edge. “The games based on our films need such large lead times that we aren’t necessarily settled on the look of the film when they start.

“So we give them some conceptual images and I’m not only surprised but sometimes jealous at how fast they can work and how quickly their realtime rendering engines seem to move things along. We sometimes wish we could have something like that to move things along early in production.”

He later added:

“The big thing lacking in video games, and I haven’t seen one that has done this for me, is how you involve a strong narrative story.

“Not just a set-up that you jump in to, but a narrative story in which the player is an active participant. I’ve had this conversation with friends now for almost a decade on how you could actually do that with a video game.

“Unfortunately, although I think there would be a market for that, I don’t think the market would be large enough.”

PIC: MUSEUM OF MODERN ART