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Activision’s tie-in videogame to the 2006 movie X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: The Official game covers the events of the films X2: X-Men United and The Last Stand, bridging the gap between the two films and trying to explain some facts between the two movies, especially why Nightcrawler is not present for The Last Stand.

The game was developed by Z-Axis for a variety of consoles including PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Nintendo GameCube, by Beenox for the PC, WayForward Technologies for GBA, by Amaze Entertainment for Nintendo DS and finally by Marvel Mobile for mobiles.

Who’s behind it all

Zak Penn and Chris Claremont co-wrote the story for the game. Penn is the co-writer of X-Men: The Last Stand, and Claremont was a longtime writer of the X-Men comic books, establishing the persons for many of the "new" X-Men team, which featured then new members Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Banshee, and Wolverine. Claremont is perhaps best known for The Dark Phoenix Saga. Together, the two have woven a tale that fits in between X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand continuity.

Zak Penn is a screenwriter and director who is known for writing and directing Incident at Loch Ness and co-writing the script for X-Men: The Last Stand.

The screenplay for Last Action Hero, which he received a Story By credit on with Adam Leff, was nominated for a 1993 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Screenplay, however it lost to the Indecent Proposal script. Recently, Penn has been hired to write the script for the sequel to Hulk. Penn graduated from Wesleyan University in 1990.

Claremont is regarded as one of the hallmark Marvel Comics writers, having written one of the flagship titles, the Uncanny X-Men, for sixteen consecutive years. Claremont excelled at the task of writing good "team" arcs, in which every member of the ensemble cast of X-Men had her/his moment to shine.

He was lauded for writing action-packed stories with strong characters, both heroes and villains, mixing it with soap opera elements and always bringing in the social undercurrent of mutants being a harassed minority. Claremont also promoted strong female characters such as Jean Grey, Storm and Moira MacTaggert, who were a far cry from the token roles usually reserved for women at that time. Claremont’s approach set the standard for team-based comic books for decades.

The most common criticism of his work is his overly descriptive writing style. Claremont’s characters tend to speak in long paragraphs that are often called forced or unrealistic. He frequently employs third-person omniscient narration to describe events that might easily be conveyed in the art and unneeded thought bubbles to spell out character motivation and personality, especially during action scenes. However, Claremont is seen as one of the most historically important writers ever in X-Men.

As an entry into comic writing Claremont was given the fledgling title, Iron Fist in 1974 that also teamed him with John Byrne for the first time. Len Wein then gave him the writing duties for the relaunched X-Men. Claremont also found narrative excuses to sideline Professor X, as one of the problems with the original X-Men series was that the Professor would appear at the end of the story to magically correct the situation no matter how dire.

During his years as X-Men writer, Claremont wrote or co-wrote many classic X-Men stories such as the "Dark Phoenix Saga", and "Days of Future Past". He also co-created numerous important X-Men characters, including Rogue, Psylocke, Shadowcat, Phoenix, Sabretooth, Mystique, Emma Frost, Jubilee, Rachel Summers, Mister Sinister, and Gambit.

In addition, he helped launch best-selling spin-offs such as X-Men, New Mutants, Excalibur, and Wolverine. In 1985 Marvel launched an X-Men spin-off, X-Factor that changed the Phoenix/Jean Grey continuity that Claremont had established. In 1991 he left Marvel over differences with the editorial staff.

In 2000 he returned to Marvel as part of the company’s "Revolution" event and wrote Uncanny X-Men and X-Men until he moved to X-Treme X-Men with Salvador Larroca.

As of 2005, he is again writing Uncanny X-Men, the miniseries X-Men: The End, and New Excalibur for Marvel Comics. However, he will be handing the reins of Uncanny X-Men to Ed Brubaker in summer 2006, moving over to Exiles, replacing writer Tony Bedard, who will be sticking around at Marvel a little longer, because Chris Claremont’s takeover of Exiles and his series’ GeNext have been postponed because Claremont has been diagnosed with cardiac stress.

Bedard will script Uncanny X-Men and the Annual with plots from Claremont; Tony Bedard will continue writing Exiles for a few months, Frank Tieri will take over New Excalibur, and GeNext is arriving at a later date. Claremont has written many stories for other publishers including the Star Trek Debt of Honor graphic novel, Sovereign Seven for DC Comics and Alien vs Predator for Dark Horse Comics.