Halo Novelization A Bestseller

According to Gamerfeed, the latest novel based on the Halo gameworld, called "Halo:The Flood", is a bestseller, cranking it up close to the Top 10 in the 'mass market paperback' category. Do people think that game novelisations, as discussed in this USA Today report, can be worth reading? Marc Laidlaw's CD-ROM novelization, Gadget: The Third Force, is at least one game-related novel I enjoyed a lot.

Comments

Bungie

[krel]

This is typical Bungie quality plot work. Marathon is still the best plot I've ever seen in a game, and would love to see serious book writen around it.

Quality

[KDan]

So long as the novel is good, I see nothing wrong with that. The problem I've seen was mostly that those novelisation tended to be quite bad. They brought nothing new to the game world, they had no strong and interesting characters, they had no passion put in their writing. When you add onto that that the writing itself was not particularly good, it's not a surprise that they're not very well regarded.

But should someone with talent decide to write one of those, and was careful to write it so that people with no knowledge of the game can understand and appreciate it, then there's no reason why it should be seen as any different from other novels.

Daniel