Slashdot Mirror
Does A Good Game Make A Good Movie Idea?
Brakz0rz writes "Here's a BBCi article by Daniel Etherington with an overview on how videogames translate onto the big screen. I can't say I've been impressed by any such effort so far. The article touches on John Woo's upcoming Metroid adaptation. Etherington writes, "One of these days, someone has just got to make a decent video game movie. How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda? Now that would be promising." I would enjoy that more than the games franchised from the LOTR trilogy."
Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Mario...
games make TERRIBLE movies
How about a metal gear solid movie. Imagine if that came out in the movie format instead of the game format... Wait it did come out in the movie format! What sucks though is that lots of these game-movie adaptions stray away from the main story of the series which is what makes the series so unique to begin with. Case in point, Final Fantasy Spirits Within.
The same way a movie makes a bad game idea.
Something suffers because the time to market seems to influence the outcome of the product,
Two words: Tomb Raider
God spare us all....
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Games and movies have different life cycles.
A decent game often gets better in its second abnd third versions as technology improves and the story lines get more mature.
Films sequels are rarely better than the original and often dramatically worse.
Today, games make more money than films. A successful game franchise - that has many years of life left - can be ruined by one poor film tie-in.
So the ideal model is to take a good film and turn it into a series of games, and to resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
LoTR does not really count as a film + sequels since it is based on an existing story and was shot in one go.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Well there was that Super Mario Bros movie...
It is good that video game movies are a fairly recent innovation. Lest we end up watching pong for 90 minutes.
I think that movies make even worse video games, though:ET for the Atari anyone?
Clue was pretty good and it's "based" on a game.
I am still waiting anxiously for Pong: the Movie to come out in theaters.
That game provided me more dramatic entertainment than two thirds of the movies I've seen. It convinced me beyond any doubt that games are a form of art.
The Raven
The reason why games usually make terrible movies is pretty obvious. It's because the movies are usually made out of high-profile action games - to cash in on the name, as is standard practise in Hollywood.
These kinds of games are, of course, plot-free zones. Hence, the movie makers fill the void in an ad-hoc fashion, usually with horrible results.
Speaking of Zelda, anyone remember the old Zelda cartoons that we had on TV once? That's a classic example of what I'm talking about; those cartoons made my eyes bleed. Badly.
I can imagine that it WOULD be possible to make a good movie out of a good, plot-filled game, such as the old Lucasarts/Lucasfilm Games ones. Those would at least be funny. But, that hasn't happened yet. I'm still crossing my fingers ...
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Just last Thursday I heard a lecture about digital effects in movies and games by George Joblove and Douglas Kay, two former ILM-ers who have now moved to Sony Imageworks and Mondo Media, respectively. One of the clips that Douglas Kay showed was a concept for a project they're doing which is a combined movie and game. The idea is that the movie is done entirely digitally, and at a technological level that can be reproduced on a game console, so that there is a seemless transition between the movie environment and the game. Sounded like a good idea to me.
This side up.
It is funny how these type of stories come up now and then because, for awhile now, I've been really set on the idea of a Grim Fandango movie. I can't think of any game which could more readily translated onto the big screen. Even as a video game it still boasted an incredibly well developed story with a wonderful atmosphere and stellar voice acting.
My dream? Pixar doing Grim Fandango. Something like that would, in my mind, help make up for all the Tomb Raiders and Mortal Combats.
forma3
If you liked "Saturday Night Fever", you'll love Dance Dance Revolution: The Movie!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Example: most adventure/shoot-em-up games are almost all fighting, with the occasional puzzle. These are entertaining because they tax your reflexes or your strategic thinking. It's fun to do that yourself, and so they're entertaining, but it's boring to watch someone else do that for more than about 10 minutes.
Also, because there's so much time spent in fighting & puzzles, the story background and character development in games is often (yes, often, not always, but very often) weak to non-existent. A shining example: Final Fantasy. That game has more character development than most adventure games do, and it was still a boring movie.
Short answer: there's a long gap between things that are fun to *do* and things that are fun to *watch*. The only thing that clearly falls in both catagories is sex, but I'm not going to go there right now.
How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda?
I can't wait to see what the original zelda theme sounds like when a full symphony plays it.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic would make an outstanding movie. If someone actually bothered to make it, the storyline and characters are much better than anything Lucas is putting out in the "current" trilogy.
Video games are a different medium than films. Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were more action-oriented games with hardly any plot. Hmmm... what kind of a movie do you think is going to arise out of a video game like that?
Basing a movie off of an RPG, such as KOTOR, would at least give the writers and directors more meat to play with. They probably wouldn't have to do too much yet still remain true to the game.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Seriously, that chick was getting kidnapped or shanghaighed so many times that she probably has to have 911 preprogrammed on speeddial in her cellphone just to keep up.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I always thought that Nethack would make a good movie.
The biggest question is who to cast as '@'
There are a couple of basic problems with translating a video game to a movie:
(1) Most video games have thin, unelaborated setup plots. Nobody cares when it's the game, as long as the play/action is good. When it comes time to move things to the silver screen, though, it's much more important.
(2) A good video game movie could be based on a character's adventure in the world set up by the game -- but in addition to simply treating it as a sequence of scenes where the character accomplishes the same goals as the video game (or even some new goals you make up), and throwing in cool effects and kick-butt action, you'd have to make the character emotionally and intellectually three-dimensional. Why do they do what they do? Where are they vulnerable and strong? How do they grow/change over the course of the movie? However, most video game movies don't try to do this at all -- just walk through the levels, kids! -- and so you get bored out of your skull.
Tweet, tweet.
I remember an exception : Willow was a perfect match on screen and in its 16 colors pixel adaptation...
I just remembered I need to boot my computer... with my Tredair!
A good story makes a good story.
"Good Game" is not a descriptive enough term to determine whether or not some bit of content will translate well to another format. Game 'genres' are comparatively less like genres and more like species. You can find common ground between the worst Ahnuld action flick and your favorite movie (assuming they are not the same) - differences in movie genres are all content-based.
But while the ancestor of the arcade genre are arcade action games, graphic adventures have their roots in interactive fiction, MMORPGs hail from MU*s, CRPGs descend from board games, and other physical games translate to video well without need of additional story (e.g. Chessmaster, Hoyle's). Differences in game genres are both form- and content-based, and not to any set ratio.
So the answer fully depends on why the game is "good". If it's good because it has a compelling story, great characters, etc., then duh, it will probably make a good movie. If not, then in the absence of a good script doctor it will not.
It wasn't all that bad. It was an okay action movie. I mean, it had Christopher Lambert.
Mortal Kombat 2, on the other hand, was such an incredibly disgusting piece of shit it almost makes Tomb Raider look like Indiana Jones.
Why not just make the movies directly from the game using the cut scenes and footage of expert player gameplay. Sega did something like this with the first Shenmue game for Dreamcast. It's actually rather interesting to watch.
Heck, it might even sell more games. Though I would go for a direct to DVD release rather than a theatre release since to market may not be very big.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Among other things, Call of Duty was pretty heavily influenced by the fantastic HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (rent it or buy it! You won't be sorry!). Hell, the first of the three campaigns in the game puts you in the shoes (or rather, the chute) of a member of the 101st Airborne as he and a bunch of other paratroopers drop over Normandy the night before D-Day; Band of Brothers follows the 101st from training to Normandy through the European theater of operations. Several of the missions from the war covered in the show are modeled in Call of Duty. Particularly impressive is the similarity between BoB and CoD's interpretations of the Battle at Brecourt, an assault on German artillery emplacements connected by a system of trenches. Damn cool stuff. :)
...Angelina Jolie made sure that movie had at least two distinct advantages. Now disasters like Wing Commander don't have any extenuating circumstances.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i think prequels may be a good model for movie adoptions of video games. any decent game has a plot and a setting. it would sense to make a movie to "set up the story".
.sig business long ago.
just waiting for pacman the movie with michael madson as pacman explaing why he is so afraid of these monsters.
--
i left the
Those help messages are in the game because there's always new players, and because many items (like the Hookshot) are not immediately obvious. Bottles are actually rather tricky for new players -- without that help message, most would never guess that you could do things like bottle fairies. It'd be nice if they could be turned off, but on the other hand, since there's not really a huge number of special items in Zelda relative to the length of the game, I think the description and music fanfare (Dum-duh-dah-DAAA!) lend a sense of ceremony to whenever you get a new goodie.
But I don't see how a good Zelda movie could be made. Ignoring the fact that Hollywood only makes movie-games when it's looking to make a quick buck and never when they want to produce something of artistic merit, Zelda's just too far outside their definition of "cool." If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.
Remember: three of Nintendo's big four heroes, Mario, Link and Samus either never or hardly ever get dialogue in their games. (The fourth is Kirby, who also never gets dialogue, but neither does anyone else in his games.) I think it'd wreck the characters to give them dialogue. Just like Sonic, and thus the Sonic Adventure games, seem a lot lamer when he's got a speaking part.
People have spoken that a movie and a game to both work well need a good plot and good action. Homeworld was both. The action in the game was great, you had the plot of the story and the characters where there developing as it went along and you really felt a part of the story versus just watching and have you head slump over in bordom.
Life is to be experienced, not frowned upon. -Uknown