Questionable Movie-to-Game Adaptations
Published September 03, 2004
Video-game tie-ins with popular movies have come along way since the days in which Atari buried millions of unsold E.T. cartridges in a New Mexico landfill. Led by Electronic Arts' excellent adaptations of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, video game developers have shown that it is possible to make a good--and sometimes even great--game based on a film.
The pinnacle of this notion was this summer's release of Vivendi Universal's The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, a prequel to the Vin Diesel film of the same name. Riddick wasn't just good for an adaptation, it was arguably one of the best games released for the XBox to date.
What makes the Lord of the Rings games and Riddick so great is that the developers don't attempt to slavishly follow the plot of the movie, but rather use the events from the film as a jumping off point from which to craft an original story. The tone and feel of the films are preserved, but the game is given its due treatment as an entertainment experience apart from its source material. Of course, this strategy can backfire, even with an excellent development team and a huge budget, as it did with the excrable Enter the Matrix game.
Unfortunately, game developers seem to be getting somewhat complacent, as evidenced by several recent announcements of upcoming games based on movies.
The first offender was Fight Club, a fighting game based on the 1999 David Fincher film. Drew Feinberg has already covered in-depth exactly why a video game adaptation of that film is so ill-conceived.
But now an even more egregious adaptation has been announced. Warner Bros. completely unecessary remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will now be accompanied by a game, planned to be released the same day as the film next summer. Just as fans of the Roald Dahl book and the original film were getting used to idea that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were going to butcher this classic, the studio had to add insult to injury by taking it one step further.
Now, with Take Two Interactive developing the game, it may well turn out to be decent enough. But, quite frankly, there are some movies that should just be left well enough alone. This is one of them.
More news and reviews at scottpepper.blogspot.com.
- Questionable Movie-to-Game Adaptations
- Published: September 03, 2004
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- Section: Gaming
- Filed Under: Video: News
- Writer: Scott Pepper
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I have four words for you doubters of game-to-movie translations: Atari's Tank: The Movie. Tell me that wouldn't be awesome.
My favourite video game to movie adaptation was Pong. What made it great was that it was made by Russ Meyer (and written by Roger Ebert) and renamed "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens".
So why haven't they made a movie version of "Leather Goddess of Phobos"?
What they need to do is start making these movies more like the videogames themselves. I'm talking Mortal Kombat as a 2-D, platform movie. Awesome.
how can you talk about movie-to-game adaptations without mentioning the excellent Blade Runner ponit-and-clicker on the PC? also a sterling example of how a game of the movie can do so well when it doesn't slavishly follow the move's plot (it actually had a whole new story, with brief intelinks to the movie's plot, that i and many others felt captured the spirit of the Blade Runner world very well)
as for some other bad movie-to-game transitions:
-most of the star wars ones (ironically, the best star wars games are not based on any of the movies)
-the fifth element
-bad boys II
-many generic par/sub-par platformers from the '80s (like the Lethal Weapon games, Robocop, Total Recall, etc.)
i remember reading a section in a book written by a highly esteemed typa fella that compared Terminator 2 to computer games, basically saying that it was a non-interactive platform game. Beat the boss at the end of each level and progress to the next part kinda deal. I remember feeling very impressed by that.
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You should also think of those poor games that have been turned into movies. House of the Dead, Street Fighter, Mario Bros., etc. Also, how in the hell are they going to turn Crazy Taxi into a movie (Next summer premiere I believe)? People are idiots.