Seth Green

Actor and Robot Chicken mastermind Seth Green will soon be teaming up with rapper Master P to hand you over the business with Play The Industry, a Hollywood role-playing game.

With the third season currently airing on Adult Swim, and the second just released on DVD, you’d think Robot Chicken star and co-creator Seth Green would be too busy with puppet poultry to do much of anything else. But ever the master multitasker, Green — who also appears on Family Guy and the Austin Powers movies — has somehow found the time to collaborate on Play The Industry, a new video game he’ll soon be working on with rapper Master P and his Chicken co-producers. Though, as he explained when we spoke to him recently, the game isn’t what friends of P might expect.

How did the deal between Stoopid Monkey Productions, which you own with Chicken co-creator Matt Senreich, ShadowMachine Films, who co-produce Chicken, and Master P’s P. Miller Enterprises come together?

Master P is a fan of Robot Chicken, and approached us about collaborating with him on a couple of ideas, and this was the one we all felt the most connected to and enthusiastic about.

What kind of game is Play The Industry ?

I know it’s been bandied about, but it’s not a hip-hop video game. Unfortunately, we’re not at a place where we can really talk about it a lot because it’s still being developed, but it will be a game in which people will be able to play as all different facets of the entertainment industry, whether it’s as a performer, an athlete, a manager, a publicist, that kind of thing. It will be a console game and an online game as well.

"Master P is a fan of Robot Chicken, and approached us about collaborating with him on a couple of ideas ..."

How much of the idea behind the game did Master P have when he came to you?

He just had an overview of an idea and wanted some help fleshing it out, to write materials and design characters and things like that.

Is there a game that’s out now that you think is similar to yours?

The closest thing it could be compared to is Star Wars Galaxies or World of Warcraft or even The Sims if The Sims had more long-term objectives.

Will it be a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)? Similar to a Hollywood version of Warcraft?

Yeah, we’re seeking to create an environment that people can create characters and then build up their personalities and reputations and deal with things like success and failure. It’ll be an adventure tale and a morality tale.

So you can be a bitchy, coked out teen starlet?

It is very much a chose your own adventure. Honestly, I can’t wait until we can talk more about it. We’re just in this place where we’re keeping it under wraps as much as possible.

Now the irony of all this is that you’re not into video games.

Well, it’s not that I have no knowledge of video games, I’m just not an avid gamer. From the time I was eight years old, I’ve spent hundreds of hours mastering Ms. Pac-Man and Tetris. It’s just the more modern games like Halo or World Of Warcraft that I’ve never been into. I can appreciate them, I just don’t have the time or the inclination to spend twenty hours a week to build up my character.

Have you had any problems because of this? Like did you ever hear that Charlize Theron had a crush on you but lost it when she found out you were not into video games?

Ha! I have not had a girl decide that she was uninterested in me based on my lack of ability to play video games. No, that hasn’t come up.

"I have not had a girl decide that she was uninterested in me based on my lack of ability to play video games. No, that hasn’t come up."

Has anyone ever approached you about making a Robot Chicken game?

We have talked about it, but nobody’s offered any kind of valuable suggestions about what it would be. And we have not be able to figure something out either. I mean, what would a Robot Chicken game be?

Oh, I have no idea.

Exactly. We went through all our sketches and our concept and tried to figure something out but we never came up with anything we’d like to play.