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Blade Runner's Influence on Videogames
A 1up feature looks at the influence that Ridley Scott's amazing cyberpunk film Blade Runner has had on gaming. In addition to outlining the (underappreciated) late 90's direct game adaptation, the article discusses the film's subtler touch on tone, music, and content in other titles. "Try as William Gibson might to distance himself from Blade Runner's influence, the game adaptation of his seminal novel ironically takes a lot of its visual cues from Blade Runner, particularly in its realization of the urban sprawl. Even better, we got a little proto-cyberpunk musical influence in the soundtrack. Neuromancer boasted a technically impressive, if scratchy, Commodore-synth rendition of Devo's "Some Things Never Change" playing over the title. Truth be told, the song is actually much improved by the necessary excision of all the lyrics except for the chorus."
Try as William Gibson might to distance himself from Blade Runner's influence, the game adaptation of his seminal novel
I'm sure Phillip K. Dick will be glad to know that Gibson's now taking the heat for Blade Runner's influence! It must be a huge weight off his shoulders to know that some other Sci-Fi author gets to deal with his burdeon.
When King himself (who was never happy with the Kubrick version) tried to do a TV miniseries with Mick Garris many years later, the result was not only laughably silly but also drew heavily from the Kubrick film version (literally from the very opening of wide shots of the car on the road to the Overlook, clearly influenced by the opening shots of Kubrick's version). And the elements restored from the novel all fall flat in comparison to the original film. What is a New England style hotel doing in Colorado? Why did they show these goofy ghosts? Is a croquet mallet supposed to be menacing?
Sometimes a more powerful adaptation can become more iconic than its original source material. And it's impossible to treat that material in the future without acknowledging it and/or being compared to it.
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dey say you bwade runnah
Okay, so they do look the same. I'm not so sure that means people are looking directly to Blade Runner. There's mention of 'Alien,' too, and while I love that movie, I think some of the later aliens might owe a little to HP Lovecraft. Similarly, it could be that Blade Runner and the games supposedly inspired by it happened to draw inspiration from the same source, and it might not be too far off the mark to say that source was, perhaps, William Gibson or Philip K. Dick.
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Although the sentence is structured poorly, you should still try to overcome your ADD and read the whole thing.
I'm sure Phillip K. Dick will be glad to know that Gibson's now taking the heat for Blade Runner's influence! It must be a huge weight off his shoulders to know that some other Sci-Fi author gets to deal with his burdeon.
English comprehension was never your strong suite, was it? Neuromancer was, as advertised, written by... William Gibson (and, incidentally, won the Phillip K. Dick Award).
Phillip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which Blade Runner was based, and which Gibson claimed not to have read. OK?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I don't know such things. I just do eyes. Only eyes.
I have my doubts about 'most' or even 'many' games drawing anything from blade runner
I know the game 'Blade Runner' must have been heavily influenced by the movies (and it was an amazing game overall in its time).
With that said, robots, cyborgs, flying cars, all things futuristic had already been in movies and many books etc, although not with the same level of graphics, or decent acting and good directing that blessed blade runner and made it a good movie.
For me, the game provided a bizarre element of spectatorship. You felt like you were playing a movie, rather than being the lead role in a game. Very Myst-like if you've never played it.
I can't really play shadowrun without thinking of a blade runner type setting for the campaign. Sometimes we would have the movie on in the background to kind of help keep us in the setting for the game.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Blade runner is a decent movie, at best. It is a boring crime drama with a boxing match thrown in. And yes, I've seen it a few times and OMGWTFBBQ Deckard is a replicants/!!?!
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a pretty good book, though, and I'm not sure Blade Runner overshadows it so much because of its undeniably high quality as because of its more popular medium. Both are fairly deep pieces of art, but their underlying themes are so different that the iconic moments specific to the film wouldn't even make sense in the book.
Personally, I think that people who didn't read the article deserve +5 interesting. Quit screwing around by only modding parent to +4, go for the gold!
Interestingly enough, some months back I talked to an old lady who said the film version of The Shining couldn't hold a candle to the novel. Never read the book myself though.
It's not so much a "how it influenced video gameS", but "how it influenced A video game", but Blade Runner definitely influenced a game called Martian Memorandum. In fact, it pretty blatently ripped off elements of a number of differend Philip K. Dick-related properties, including plot elements of Blade Runner and Total Recall, and most directly, the visuals of Blade Runner (right down to Tyrell's giant Pyramid office and windows).
Martian Memorandum is one of those weird games that no one ever discusses and there's virtually no information about on the 'net, despite the fact that it was part of a 5-game series spanning 10 years. It was fairly leading-edge game at the time (1990). It was a Sierra Adventure-type game with mouse/keyboard interface, but it had a much grittier look and storyline than anything Sierra or Lucasfilm were putting out (Virgin would start to come close with "Beneath a Steel Sky" 4 years later, though Memorandum was more cyberpunk-noir with less goofy humor). It was visually well done, taking full advantage of VGA (still a rarity at the time). It even had a little full motion video and one of the only games to do speech - even through the *PC speaker*. But it had a good storyline and was a pretty good game overall.
I don't know why it's turned out to be one of those largely forgotten games. I suppose some of the sequels, like "Under a Killing Moon" and "The Pandora Directive" got some mainstream attention, but Memorandum is worth checking out.
Does anyone remember this game?
Now this is a game I'd say was directly inspired by Blade runner. As if the theme wasn't obvious enough the main character's alias was "Blade". The store could have had a bit more substance, but I recall really enjoying the game. It could have also done without those arcade sequences.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the influence that Blade Runner's soundtrack had on Mass Effect's soundtrack...The two could be cousins.
The architectural structures in Blade Runner VERY heavily influenced those in a movie called Death Machine as well.
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The game theme reminds me of Syndicate's dark city. Big flashy billboards, dark, etc.
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Err, let's try this again, more intelligably:
When King himself (who was never happy with the Kubrick version) tried to do a TV miniseries with Mick Garris many years later, the result was not only laughably silly but also drew heavily from the Kubrick film version (literally from the very opening of wide shots of the car on the road to the Overlook, clearly influenced by the opening shots of Kubrick's version). And the elements restored from the novel all fall flat in comparison to the original film. What is a New England style hotel doing in Colorado? Why did they show these goofy ghosts? Is a croquet mallet supposed to be menacing?
Congratulations. You've demonstrated that, left to his own devices, King does a crappy job adapting his works to the big screen (a fact that is, I think, reasonably well known).
But how does a good adaptation, which differs signficantly from the novel, and a bad adaptation which is closer to the novel, demonstrate that the good adaptation is better than the novel itself?
Hint: it doesn't.
In fact, I would argue the film adaptation is more "iconic" than the novel simply because a) it's film, and therefore will have a greater pop culture impact, and b) it's Kubrick. 'nuff said.
And, as it happens, I think both the book and the movie are excellent, but for very different reasons (which shouldn't be surprising, given they're completely different mediums).
"Sometimes a more powerful adaptation can become more iconic than its original source material." That may well apply to the Arbus imagery and Bartok 'percussion' piece used in the film as well.
Pioneer 2, the colony ship city from where you teleport to the planet below, has several elements directly influenced from blade runner.
The background music is inspired from the movie score, several flying vessels pass above you regularly, and if you know where to look, you can even notice a sign on a nearby building that is very similar to the ATARI symbol.
(The latter has been removed in ulterior versions of the game).
The synthesised soundtrack in Mass Effect is brilliant, and really stirs up a Blade Runner "feel".
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Well, I have to say, in many respects I liked book version of The Shining better than the movie version, though they are both exceptional. I think of it more like the movie version of Dune...An excellent attempt to make a book that is nearly impossible to convey on the screen into something that, while not to the letter true to the original, is still awesome in it's own right and carries forward something of the spirit of the piece. King's attempt to re-vision it fell flat because he doesn't understand how to make something that is cool and suspenseful on the page into something that is cool and suspenseful on the screen.
I also remember that episode of Friends, which happened to be one of the few I'd actually watched, and which forever cemented in my mind the idea that I wasn't missing much at all. If you're going to write an episode where one of the central plots revolves around a pair of books, you'd think someone would have bothered to read them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
> Yet none of these elements was in the novel--they all came from the superior film version (in an episode of "Friends" I got a particular kick out of Joey talking about the novel that he had only recently discovered, with everything he described coming from the movie not the novel--an obvious result of the ignorance, not of Joey, but the "Friends" writers).
Perhaps they were trying to make an ironic point if *all* of those features were from the movie, but not the book.
piss off
Can't forget one of the most important Blade Runner inspired games to have been forgotten by and large by the masses. If you haven't played it, it's a toss up between the Japanese PCEngine and US/EU SegaCD releases as to which is best. So depending on your language skills, pick your poison.
That's all you were capable of getting out of it? Even in multiple viewings? That's it?
You shouldn't really be advertising that fact, unless possibly, you're looking for sympathy? I'm too busy to feel bad for you. I'm watching some boring crime drama where they play classical music and drink milk with drugs in it while kicking the snot out of old men. "Yarbles! Great bolshy yarblockos to you!"
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
This reminds me of Clarke's preface to 2010 where he discussed the influence of Kubrick adaptation of his previous work on the sequels he was writing. It was rather impressive to see an author not only acknowledging the superiority of an adaptation of his own work, but to admit that the adaptation had changed the way he imagined all ensuing work.
Pity King who can't defer to those who reinterpret his work with a deft hand.
[Hint: "imbued"]
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Seminal...Philip K. Dick...
I'm sorry, my android brain is about to explode from the dirty joke potential!
Despite its undenied visual brilliance, Kubrick's film misses a key element that is responsible for much of the novel's power. In the book, there is considerable suspense as to whether or not the father will succumb to the influence of the hotel. In Kubrick's version, Jack Nicolson is directed as so nearly crazed from the outset that there is never any doubt how things will go.
I agree that the more faithful TV miniseries is not as strong a film as Kubrick's version, but few directors have the visual power of Kubrick.
Heck - Blade Runner's influence on Photoshop!
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
The linked article goes into exactly one single detail that somehow magically links the videogame Neuromancer with the Blade Runner movie: "its realisation of the urban sprawl[.]"
Gimme a break. Urban frigging sprawl means the Neuromancer videogame somehow took its cues from Blade Runner? There IS no urban sprawl in the videogame! It's one of the most sterile, perfect-looking, and primarily *EMPTY* "sprawls" ever conceived!
It's crystal clear neither Scott Sharkey nor Jenn Frank (the authors of the linked article) actually played the game, nor in their haste to say something witty and clever and find links and patterns where there are none, did they manage to actually make a coherent point.
What utter, typical crap.
Orson Scott Card wrote a book adaptation of the movie The Abyss. He created motivating backgrounds for many of the characters. I read the book first and was disappointed by the movie which had very little of the character development. It was one of the rare times when a book based on a movie was really good.
I can't wait for the 40th anniversary edition of Andy Warhol's Soup Can to be released! I really hope they touch up the red. Maybe add a small reflection to the exposed metal of the can. Maybe this release will really show what the creator meant. Every release of Blade Runner is beating a dead horse. With Clockwork Orange you don't have people going around rereleasing saying "Oops, this is what it really means."
I might be stretching it, but I think Ridley Scott's genius was in approaching the same theme (what does it mean to be human?) from the opposite direction than PKD. An Androids, the distinguishing quality is empathy (for animals, specifically), which the androids do not have. In Bladerunner (at least the director's cut), it is the androids that show human emotions while the Rick Deckard character is almost psychopathically emotionless.
I think Scott did an honest treatment of the original material and stayed true to Dick's themes, even if the final product was vastly different. Read the book again, then watch the director's cut and maybe you'll see what I mean.
I was still sad that the Pennfield Mood Organ didn't make it into Bladerunner.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
BloodNet, Beneath a Steel Sky, Rise of the Dragon, Syndicate ...those were the days, we really were spoiled with great cyberpunk games back then.
Now get off my lawn and let me listen to the Quarantine OST.