Westeros

For those who decided to wait patiently for Cyanide’s Game of Thrones: Genesisstrategy game at a lower price point, the game’s become part of Steam’s Daily Deals, with prices reduced 75% ($9.99 in the US, 9.99€ in Europe). Currently the deal has about 19 hours to go before it’s back to its regular price point.

UPDATE: There are some significant corrections to this story. We’ve learned that some of our report was based on a faulty transcript of the interview, and along the way we were informed of some additional details that may be of interest.

Brazilian media website POP has an interview with Vince Gerardis,  founder of Grok! Studio and a co-producer on Game of Thrones who helped bring GRRM and Benioff & Weiss together, while he visits the Campus Party technology and media exhibition (this event, unfortunately, did not turn out entirely as planned—technical difficulties prevented GRRM from participating in a streamed web chat with attendees, for which Campus Party has issued sincere apologies).

There’s some fascinating bits of material, although some serious issues in translation and transcription appear to have left a lot lost in translation. We’ll correct the record below.

Blackwell, an imprint of leading academic publisher John Wiley & Sons, will next month be releasing a new entry in its Pop Culture and Philosophy series: Game of Thrones and Philosophy: Logic Cuts Deeper than the Sword (Pre-order:  US, UK). The book is due to hit shelves on March 13th.

The series uses popular culture to give philosophers a platform to delve into topics of philosophical interest in a way that’s relevant and relatable to a general audience. Part of a series edited by William Irwin, editor Henry Jacoby has gathered together twenty essays covering a wide range of topics from a distinguished group of philosophers. Also included? A short foreword from Linda and I, which we were very honored to be asked to provide.

It’s fun to see how Game of Thrones is starting to be woven into the fabric of popular culture… and, sometimes, into actual fabric. Helmut Lang revealed—through Creative Directors Nicole and Michael Colovos—that the fashion house’s Fall 2012 ready-to-wear collection was inspired by HBO’s series. When we spot the interview, we’ll share it. Until then, watch the runway show at New York’s Fashion Week, and check out Women’s Wear Daily’s full gallery showing the many looks.

There were so many positive remarks at the glimpses of the maps in Harper Collins Voyager’s enhanced e-book of A Game of Thrones that we decided to pass on the praise to Voyager… and they kindly decided to release all three maps to us as PDF files. They’re watermarked, of course, but that’s no hindreance to getting the pleasure of looking at them, and they may well be useful for those with e-readers who’d like a reference:

• Westeros & the Free Cities
• The Wall
• King’s Landing

And if you have an iPad, and happen to reside in the UK? Get a hold of the enhanced A Game of Thrones directly, which includes a dynamic map of Westeros showing the progress of characters as well as a character glossary.

Notified that a “photo blast” was coming, I had thought that it might have to do with a Game of Thrones Bluray launch event, or perhaps something to do with HBO Nederlands premiering and its launch event featuring Carice van Houten as a guest…

But no, this was much cooler than that: seventeen shiny new images of cast members both old and new! They’re now in our gallery, beginning on this page of the character gallery. The first image up? The familiar face of Arya Stark, with Joe Dempsie as Gendry asleep in the background, as well as what look to be Hot Pie and Lommy Greenhands.

A lot of movement, a lot of upcoming things of interest to fans of ASoIaF, this year. Among them? The 2013 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar with art by Marc Simonetti has been up for pre-order a bit… but now a cover has shown up over at Amazon.com (Amazon UK preorder), and it’s very nice indeed.

Also vaguely spoilerish, as it represents a scene from A Dance with Dragons, but without context it should be fine.. Great choice of scene, though, and we’re eager to see what else Simonetti has in store!

Or, at least, the actor portraying Podrick Payne is interviewed. Access Hollywood talked with Daniel Portman about his role as Tyrion’s shy, tongue-tied young squire, touching on the character’s background, his own familiarity with the novels, and his weightlifting regiment (or, rather, lack of it) to get into the part.

Portman notes he’s quite different from the character in the novel, in his personal life, but he seems to have aimed to capture a lot of it in his performance. Yes, Podrick’s a bit older for the TV series, but otherwise, it’s sounding pretty good. We’re certainly looking forward to seeing his performance, and we’ve hopes that some of his best parts in A Clash of Kings will make it through.

Back in March of last year, it was announced that Subterranean Press was going to normalize its limited edition of the A Song of Ice and Fire series by going back to the first two novels and publishing them; they had previously skipped those two, having taken over the license from the defunct Meisha Merlin. A few months later, we learned that Ted Nasmith would illustrate the first novel, A Game of Thrones.

And now GRRM has announced the artist for A Clash of Kings: Richard Hescox, a past winner of the Chesley Award, among other honors. It’ll be awhile before we see his work, but in related news, George noted that Marc Fishman had turned in all of his art for the limited edition of A Dance with Dragons... and you can see most of it, or perhaps even all of it, at his Facebook gallery (naturally, spoilers galore!)

HBO’s Game of Thrones may not have had quite enough momentum to land the majority of awards it was nominated for in most of the awards given out these last couple of months… but the Visual Effects Society seems to feel differently. Nominated in three categories, the results are in. “Winter is Coming” won the Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program award, and “The Icewall” scored a win for Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial.

The other category for animated characters in a broadcast program or commercial, where the dragons in “Fire and Blood” were nominated, lost out to this commercial from Canal+. Can’t argue with it, that’s a pretty terrific effect!

We’ve noted this via social media, but forgot to post about it: through February 27, Amazon.com is offering selected HBO programs at special prices, with savings of as muc has 60%. And, yes, Game of Thrones is part of it with 42% and 44% off the DVD and Blu-ray complete first season sets. It must be doing pretty well, because presently the Blu-ray is #3 on Amazon’s Blu-ray bestseller list.

But the other thing we noted at social media, as we were heading out for a day on the town, was that something had arrived: courtesy of HBO, Linda and I now have the Blu-ray set. We couldn’t watch any of it yesterday, but we’ve just started today and it’s as gorgeous and high-end a compilation as you can imagine. The very first thing we looked at? The Complete Guide to Westeros, and specifically the Histories & Lore section which I do believe were written by Bryan Cogman, whom we’ve interviewed previously.

SFX, the U.K.‘s biggest magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy, runs a yearly award with readers of the magazine nominating among a number of categories. They’ve now announced the results, and they are very nice indeed: A Dance with Dragons took Best Novel (with Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes a well-deserved entry on the short list), and A Game of Thrones landed Best New Show while being shortlisted for Best TV Show (which, I suspect, is perenially won by Doctor Who).

And in a nice touch, SFX managed to get George to accept the award:

Redeye Chicago has a long interview with Natalie Dormer about her roles in The Fades,  Madonna’s W.E., and (of course) HBO’s Game of Thrones, where she plays the role of Margaery Tyrell.

The Game of Thrones questions start on page 3, where Dormer proves to be quite coy about her character and her role in the story. However, she does say this:

Not to say that the thirrd season is a go, but that at least pins down their views as to when Dormer’s likely to be doing the bulk of her work if a third season is commissioned by HBO… and given the numbers it’s starting to feel like less of a question of “if” and more of a question of “when” and “how many”, if there’s the chance that HBO will commit to a two-season order this next go-around.

EW’s Spoiler Room provides some new information regarding season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones, thanks to Alfie Allen, who plays Theon GreyjoyTheon Greyjoy. Getting a chance to chat with him at the SAG Awards, this is what he had to say about what he got to do, who he loved working with, and what his favorite episode is. Mild spoilers, if you really don’t want to know anything about the story lines or new characters for season 2!

To quote:

HBO has partnered with social TV app creator Miso for the Game of Thrones Superfan Sideshow Challenge, inviting fans of the TV series to view, vote on, and even create Sideshows, a “second screen” experience which allows fellow fans to watch an episode of the series while viewing the Miso for iPhone app to see interesting facts, notable quotes, and polls that get fans to become more engaged in what they’re watching. The top producers of Sideshows—according to votes through the app or

HBO got in touch with Linda and I, asking us for Westeros.org to help launch the availability of Game of Thrones Sideshows by providing one for episode 2, “The Kingsroad”, which we were all too glad to do. It was an interesting experience, and we hope the fans of the series find some of the details we point out interesting or amusing!