It's very simple: those two are not the same media. A movie, a book are made to tell a story. A video game is made for playing, not for telling a story. They should stop adapting video games, it's pointless.
You're right in that movies and video games are different media and I wish more developers would stop trying to emulate movies so much, but as my sibling commenter points out many games do tell stories. I've even encountered games that have affected me more than a movie could. This is because of the prime difference between the mediums, player agency. As a player, being able to participate and affect the story is entirely different from being shown a story in a movie or TV show. In effect, the player and the developer are co-authors of the story the player experiences.
I actually enjoy video games with stories better than movies because I'd rather be the protagonist driving the story, rather than being the passive observer.
I remember back in the day the Final Fantasy 7 trailers had a voiceover that went something like: "Dozens of characters, hundreds of locations, a plot spanning 40 hours, they said it couldn't be done in a movie, they were right."
Lots of games tell stories these days. There's no fundamental reason those stories couldn't be adopted to the silver screen. Of course many of these stories aren't really very good, but the same can also be said of any medium. There are elements that might not translate, but that's true of any adaptation. For instance Bioshock's infamous "Would you kindly" plot point won't come though the same way in a movie.
The quote "Dozens of characters, hundreds of locations, a plot spanning 40 hours" (and the much larger numbers for some modern games) by itself is a fundamental reason those stories are hard to adopt to the silver screen.
A movie needs a couple hours of focused plot, and a limited number of in-depth characters whose motivations can reasonably be covered in this short time. A blockbuster game generally involves a much larger cast of characters, and a much, much longer/wider plot story to cover the hours.
If you leave the story as-is and just cut the "sidequests", then the movie will be full of characters who are barely introduced and whose motivations make no sense to those who haven't played the game and don't know the backstory; and if you cut the story to be "movie-sized", then it will have little resemblance to the original, as key points will need to be drastically altered.
>If you leave the story as-is and just cut the "sidequests", then the movie will be full of characters who are barely introduced and whose motivations make no sense to those who haven't played the game and don't know the backstory
FFVII: Advent Children is a great example of this. Half the characters from the original game just come stumbling into the plot with no introduction or explanation.
I think books are suitably different mediums but get cross adapted just fine. I don't think the suggestion that they're "for storytelling" holds weight, many games have very linear stories you play through with little flexibility.
And books often are even harder to translate the story aspects for because they usually take place over much longer time spans than movies or video games. Many movies made from books seem to have character relationships that seem like they should have taken much longer to develop because of it.
I thought it was better than than the trailers made it look like it would be. It's probably better without the game, though since, it simultaneously makes no sense within the game's universe and yet leads right into the beginning of the game version of Sands of Time.
I've never played the game or seen the movie, but the trailer looks pretty bad to me.
If I were making a movie about that subject (and maybe this will make it clear why I'm not a producer), I'd go for more of an "Adaptation" style film. Viewers can't control time? Play it up, by (visually) admitting that the game powers like "rewind" are done on film through multiple takes, and stunt men, and editing. That's how you translate game to film, and this game mechanic provides the perfect opportunity.
So you've got a normal action film for the first X minutes, and then there's a fight scene, and Jake trips and flubs it, and we hear someone call "cut!", and you see everything freezes while the crew rush in to reset everything to 10 seconds earlier, and they run it again. The first time this happens, it's super quick, so the audience is left wondering if they really saw it or not. As the film goes on, it happens more often, and more extensively. Maybe sometimes the actor tries several times and then gives up and runs off stage, and a stunt man runs in. Maybe sometimes you expand and see that the whole thing is happening on an editing workstation, and they move clips around to make it look like everything worked, and then they hit "play" and you're back in the story.
Then at the very end, it zooms out to show the filmmakers watching what we just saw, and they say "Nah, nobody would ever believe that it all just worked out perfectly the first time like this". Fin.
If the whole point of PoP:SoT is the protagonist's ability to control time, film already has a way to do that. Don't try to just embed an old mechanic in the new medium. That's like building an interpreter for C, and calling it a day. You've got a native JMP here, so use it.
Exposing the deus ex machina as a mundane studio recording effort is an interesting idea, but detracts from the immersiveness and suspension-of-disbelief.
Great humor potential, though it'd get stale and instead become the story.
I suppose it depends on what you're looking for in a film.
For example, I can't stand musicals, because I think characters breaking out into song and dance every 5 minutes destroys any attempt at immersiveness or believability. But lots of people love them, and don't find this incongruity problematic. So I don't think breaking from the flow of the main story necessarily breaks the story.
Did the structure of "Adaptation" detract from its 'immersiveness'? I'd say it's the wrong question to ask.
My purpose was not humor, but to pull back the curtain and show the absurdity inherent in all action movies, and the work involved. Satire can be humorous, but that's not really the goal. I'd still love watching Jackie Chan outtakes even if his movies weren't comedic.
I have no use for yet another (whitewashed) action movie. Then again, as I said, there's probably a reason I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker.
Honestly I really liked Adaptation, but then again I liked Stranger than Fiction, and many other existentialist flicks (Run Lola Run? hell yes).
I know a bunch of folks who walked out feeling cheated or confused.
I think most of the issue is that people want a) a story b) to be entertained and c) to forget about the outside world for a bit.
Anything that fills these boxes is good for mass consumption (from Hollywood producer/ purely dollars point of view). Enlightening the subject or shocking them with with new points of view are entirely stretch goals.
That's believable. Also, my idea is a single movie. It doesn't easily generate other movies. Hollywood today wants franchises, i.e., mass production, too.
The story for Prince of Persia was developed by Jordan Mechner, the author of the original game and head developer for the series. He recognizes that movies and games are fundamentally different and completely reworked the story of The Sands of Time to work better as an action-adventure movie, since watching the game's plot on the screen would've been painfully boring.
It's funny that Assassin's Creed was mentioned as being too close to the game, but I thought it managed to miss most of the major points of the game series (which wasn't super complicated to begin with).
I mean, it doesn't even succeed at convincing the audience they should root for the Assassins instead of the Templars.
It's like they assumed everyone who was watching who didn't already know the story would be too stupid to understand it.
I felt there was so much potential for that movie! The plot in e.g. AC2 is intricate. It's easy to stand on the sideline of course — I understand that this stuff is really hard to get right. It obviously is. But in my opinion, an actually great movie, movie series or series based on the plot lines in AC is still a good idea.
This article illustrates why. Some things don't cross over well. Like this article for instance. They should not have made it into a fucking video game.
I just wanted to say that this article displayed quite nicely on my phone and was nice to read through.
On the topic, I do believe that there are worthy stories in video games that can be translated to the screen not just for those who don't play games, but also for gamers who want to relive some of the story without the tedious bits in between (like farming for XP or upgrading).
The new tomb raider was probably the closest so far. I liked the tie-ins with the game and the actress did a great job of bringing the game character to life. The few things I didn't like were some of the acting and one-dimensional supporting characters. Also some scenes were just contrived, but I suppose that creeps in according to budget and timing.
There have been good video game movies, but the number is vanishingly small. Many are "so bad it's good" such as anything Uwe Boll makes, but there are a couple that seem to be created by directors who genuinely love the source material and take it in interesting directions (e.g. the first Silent Hill film, the first Resident Evil film, arguably Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within).
> Many are "so bad it's good" such as
> anything Uwe Boll makes[...]
I tried finding this again, but I think it was when Postal came out that I downloaded a version of it with a director's commentary, and it was Uwe Boll railing against his detractors non-stop, claiming he was a true artist and idiot critics just didn't understand him. It made it even more hilarious.
Uwe Boll is just an enjoyable character. He challenges many of his critics to boxing matches, and the dying breath of his character in Postal was "I hate video games".
I re-watched it a few months back; it was still enjoyable overall. I agree that it didn't match up to nostalgia, but it wasn't as bad as one might fear.
The overt sexism (and threats) towards Sonya are pretty upsetting. I'd forgotten about that, and as a teenager I wrote it off as "well I guess he's just a Bad Guy". As an adult (and parent) now, I really feel like that kind of messaging is pretty toxic and unnecessary. (Heck, just the revenge motive of he-killed-her-partner would have been enough.)
There's a lot of writing that on some levels are Bad -- low-dimensional characters, etc -- but in the context of a movie character, wasn't all that bad. The characters were in many ways as much a caricature as their video game characters were. Johnny Cage is such a caricature of what one would imagine as the intersection of a spoiled (80s or 90s?) Movie Star with a martial artist -- in many ways, he seemed a direct spoof of Van Damme or other actors. And yet, I liked that they gave his character some redeeming qualities (IIRC).
As an action film, I still enjoyed the fight choreography for most of the fights, even if you have to have some huge suspension of disbelief about things like who would want to be one of Shang Tsung's disposable minions. :) I mean, what's the benefits and compensation package for that look like?
I watched it Sunday night, and I enjoyed it almost as much as when I saw it as a 9 year old. It's not a great film, but it has a generally coherent plot and narrative structure, good with choreography, and one of the best action movie soundtracks ever made.
To this day the fight with Reptile is one of my favorite action sequences in any film I've seen.
Kinda cheating to call the Spirits Within a video game movie. It was titled Final Fantasy but was a wholly unique story and new characters and everything.
Most video game movies probably shouldn't directly translate the source game, since what works in a game and what works in a movie are so different.
And to be fair, most films based on other media don't directly translate their source material either. Oh sure, novel based films do, but most comic book movies seem to have plots written specifically for the movie, with elements from various comic issues mixed in. And most based on TV series usually have new stories too.
I just came here to read the Uwe Boll comments. In person he is really entertaining - once went to a screening where he did a q&a. Definitly worth it. He really likes talking about his 'admiration' for Michael Bay...
This is an easy answer I’m sure I’ve given on here before; when you adapt a book to a movie you have an excess of story and character development. You boil it down to its essential ingredients. Sometimes it still turns out bad but this is why book adaptations are far more successful than video hames.
Video games get away with a lot less plot and character development because of their interactive nature and because they are graded on a curve. Many classic games have basically no character development at all.
People think adapting a game into a movie should be a natural transition but it isn’t at all. They are totally different forms.
If this were the case, Warcraft would've knocked it out of the park. It's lore covers many hundreds of hours of gameplay content and a decent number of full books.
It depends. RPGs have a lot more character development than action games. Something like Mass Effect would be pretty straightforward to adopt into a movie (biggest question: Man or Woman Shepard?). If you're trying to adapt Space Invaders then yeah, the scriptwriter has their work cut out for them.
Could be worse, you could be adopting classic boardgames. The Battleship movie was gloriously dumb. Monopoly would come across as a critique of capitalism. Actually, the Clue movie was a lot of fun.
I loved the Mass Effect games but I disagree it’s an automatic home run. The characters are all very thin and the main character, like most main characters is a vessel for the player to project themselves into and not a compelling protagonist.
You don't think Garrus, Tali, Wrex, or Mordin have enough depth for a 90 minute movie? Shepard will of course require the screenwriter to flesh him or her out because of the nature of the game--I'm guessing a Hollywood screenwriter wouldn't have the balls for a renegade Shep though.
You'd be better off killing off Shepard in the first minute and having those supporting characters having to deal with it and carry on, than you would be having someone write their version of Shepard and have everyone bitch about how it's not right.
Couldn't sit through the whole thing. I just don't buy Mark Wahlberg as Max Payne. He's a little too clean-shaven in that movie. Was he at least using pain killers to fight past his injuries?
I guess I'll be the odd ball who thought that Mortal Kombat was a decent movie. The fact that it seemed to use existing martial arts movies (Enter the Dragon and Game of Death, in particular) as a template rather than the game itself seemed to help.
I was pretty young when I saw that movie for the first time, but I still re-watch it from time to time and enjoy it. There is something charming about how hyper serious it is, while being absolutely ridiculous.
I don't want that story to be ruined by directors/producers/writers taking creative liberties.
Some things just shouldn't be live-action movies. Look at all the anime movie failures. They were perfectly fine in their original animated format. No need for live action, except to keep people in the movie industry employed.
The 2016 Warcraft movie doesn't count? It got a 77% audience score, and a 27% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, grossed almost half a billion, and is the highest grossing video game movie of all time[1].
I watched it out of a sheer morbid curiosity, and haven't played any Warcraft title newer than II: Tides of Darkness. I thought the movie was crap.
But maybe I and critics just aren't the audience for these movies. Seems most people who saw it liked it. Doesn't that make it at least "Good"?
It is a cliche to say this, but the movie really was made for fans and not for the general "Normie" audience.
They would just name drop locations and people, expecting you to know what they were. It was just mostly a fan service, "here is your movie, loyal fans!" types.
It still wasn't "great" even if you were a fan, but I can't imagine how bad a lot of it would have come off as if you didn't follow things pretty closely to begin with.
Another interesting thing about the Warcraft movie is how well it did in China compared to the US ($24m opening weekend in the US vs. $156m first five days in China).
I'm a fan of the Warcraft lore (though not where WoW took it). I found it pretty awful too. It seemed to lack a story - "stuff" just seemed to happen. It was like a 6-year old telling a story: there was no coherence or continuity. I've liked tons of movies that have done poorly with critics but a common theme across all of them is that they had a storyline.
To put this in perspective, I enjoyed Doom (2005) which is renowned for being one of the worst game movies around.
I have been a fan of Warcraft since I played Warcraft 2: Through the Dark Portal I think.
I played WoW for years starting with US open beta (I'm from the EU)
But the movie was just childish and simple. I'm starting to think that I moved on from simple plots to some more interesting things. Like Asimov instead of Star Wars...
Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for. Videogames are great at being interactive diversions, but their stories leave a lot to be desired and are really just thin background dressing for the real reason we play videogames: for the gameplay.
The most successful videogame movies tend towards genre films like Mortal Kombat (the film) and Resident Evil (the series).
Of course, let's not forget that it can be hard to make a good movie, period.
The video games that do have a decent plot often have a plot that just can't be squeezed into a movie. I've seen some decent anime conversions of some video games, which were arguably interactive anime anyhow (i.e., Persona 4), but at roughly 8 hours (call it 24 20 minute episodes by the time you're done with commercials, opening, and closing) and still feeling a bit squeezed at times, that's not going to be a movie any time soon. From a more western perspective, good luck getting Planescape: Torment into a movie format.
I supposed if Hollywood had some confidence about making video game movies they might be very excited about getting a pre-made trilogy, but since their lack of confidence is well-founded in fact I don't see this happening any time soon.
"From a more western perspective, good luck getting Planescape: Torment into a movie format."
A Game of Thrones-style "Sigil: City of Doors" series might work. Don't reuse the Nameless One or the plot of the game. Maybe reuse some characters like Annah. Like the game developers did, use the setting and make up new characters and plots.
Maybe before the show airs, put a series of entertaining shorts up on YouTube that introduce the city, the unusual beings resident there, the factions, and finally the main characters of the series.
Hmm, I don't play video games, but I do play board games. People that play board games say the same thing - you don't play a board game for the theme, you play it for the gameplay or the game mechanics (though a fun theme doesn't hurt).
On the other side: I know a few games, like TLoU, have tried to go the "movie-esque" route, with mixed success. TLoU was quite successful, but I don't think there have been too many other video games that have done well with the "movie-like" approach.
I think you're right that video games often sacrifice storytelling for gameplay, which I definitely don't mind.
I disagree. You have games like The Last of Us, The Uncharted Series, Yakuza 0, and even the latest Wolfenstein game having very well made and engaging stories which I think can translate well on film.
I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.
The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie
All of the repetitive missions in games would work well in a series. I mean most TV shows follow that formula, you know at a certain time in a cop show they will figure out whodunnit and proceed to the thematic close of events.
At the end of the day I think therein lies the difficulty. The entire point of a movie based on a video game in my opinion would be to allow fans to explore the world further in another medium. It's to enhance immersion, not replace it. A great video game movie probably wouldn't be very good for someone who hasn't played the game.
I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.
There are definitely games that I wish I could get the "cliff notes" experience. GTA comes to mind - 4 had an interesting enough (if generic) story, but just took forever to finish because of its million mostly copy-paste go-here-shoot-things quests. Same goes for Final Fantasy & most other JRPGs - there are some interesting themes and story in there, but it's padded out so much by turn based combat that I usually burn out half way through.
I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.
There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.
I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.
Uncharted are some of the most cinematic games I’ve played, only topped by horizon zero dawn, but I think their storylines are just a little too flat to translate into an interesting movie. It would be like an indiana jones knockoff.
Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.
Uncharted and last if us are really poorly written imo. They are full of the clichés, they just cover it up with good voice acting. Uncharted makes Indian Jones look like citizen kane by comparison.
The Witcher 3. Part of the problem is that often your story-heavy games are really telling dozens of different stories. In TW3 for example, the main story is good but not amazing, yet several of its "secondary" stories are fantastic.
Oof. Which ones? After the ten thousandth person recommended the game to me, I recently played through it and never found a plot that I didn't find pretty flat. Plus, I couldn't tell if the terrible dialog and gratuitous cringe-worthy softcore CGI porn sequences were supposed to be a self-aware in-joke.
There are lots of great side quests in The Witcher 3. The wolfman one, the one with the ghost and the oven, the one that takes part in a tower in an island in a lake, the one where you finish tracking down some witches...
Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.
And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.
I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.
Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.
>I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.
Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.
If you played through the entire game and didn't find any of the stories compelling, all I can really do is shrug and say apparently it wasn't the game for you. I'm curious what games you've felt were "non-flat" and well written?
If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):
* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion
* Bloody Baron sub-plot
* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion
* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad
* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz
* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory
Hm, do you like any fantasy at all? It sounds like it might not be your genre. Hard sci-fi more your thing? In that case The Talos Principle is pretty good, if fairly gameplay heavy.
Loved The Talos Principle, but also enjoyed Skyrim. Skyrim’s quests and side quests felt a bit thing-collecty at times, but I feel like you could get into it as a nationalistic boy scout viking barbarian, or an angry lizard thief, or an elven mage and play three different games.
With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.
I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.
Many of the Witcher 3 substories seem to be reincarnations of the various stories told in the original books - I mean, Witcher is not a "game story" but an adaptation of novels, and these novels have also been adapted into movies and IIRC a TV series some decades ago;
The first Mass Effect honestly felt like playing through an interactive movie for me.
How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.
I'd even hesitate to put Transistor on the list because I liked the gameplay so much. I played it through 4 times to get a platinum trophy on PS4. But the story is pretty cool, and I dreaded that ending every time.
I would say that the looking glass games (thief, systemshock, etc), and the games that they inspired are a good place to start (deus ex and its sequels, the bioshock games, everything by Arkane right now [Prey is great]). The witcher games are incredibly rich, but since they do have books as source material I don't know if I would include them as much. I always thought the Psychonauts story and writing was great and an example of something that didn't have to be gritty, dark and dramatic.
I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.
That Dragon, Cancer; Portal 2; Grim Fandango; Her Story; What Remains of Edith Finch; The Vanishing of Ethan Carter; Papers, Please
And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.
Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.
Papers, Please doesn't have a story per se, only a setting. You don't really beat the game, you just get one of several different endings which depend on more than just making mistakes and playing "badly". Getting a "bad" ending doesn't count as losing the game.
But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.
Yeah, but the incident that interrupts you early on (level 3?) in Papers, Please is pretty famous. You're right that "story" is not the only interesting criterion, because some games make scenarios where lots of interesting stories can play out, and others just evoke make a mood/vibe without much of a story going on. Those would also be good options for movie adaptations.
IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)
> There are ~~absolutely~~ fantastic stories in video games.
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.
The old Goosebump novels were great at this. Every chapter, some sort of cliffhanger. Most of the time it was the character overreacting or mis-seeing something.
But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.
I disagree with the "mostly", without some quantified support. Unless you mean that most of the games selected are substandard stories, but I didn't see a list of the 35 mentioned.
I would posit that perhaps the filtration system of making a wide audience film has more impact on how the screenplay is adapted and I haven't noticed that being discussed.
>disagree with the "mostly", without some quantified support
Yes, it's not merely "mostly", it's nearly all.
Except if we talk about some old-style adventure games (and even those aren't any narrative masterpieces either, they barely make it into "adult fiction" level), video games are just some very basic plot skeleton -- as opposed to a plot.
If they have nuance and atmosphere, that's in their visual, audio and interactive elements (as opposed to the plot and narration).
So you're pointing out that Tetris, Asteroids, and Angry Birds don't have plot and narration?
Taking a complete list of every interactive program that qualifies as a video game and saying 99% of them don't have a plot seems similar to saying 99% of books don't have a narrative or plot.
Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I thought the parameter of -games that were intended to actually narrate a story- was heavily implied in this thread.
TLOU is basically a movie. I played a few hours and got bored because it felt like I was watching mainly cutscenes with gameplay interspersed. Interesting movie, just not a great game.
I would argue that average mainstream comic, book or movie have much better plot, characters etc then mainstream game. They however completely sux if judged by standards we normally judge games. (By which I want to say that games are not inferior all things considered, just that plot is not their strong part.)
I think that's close to the mark, but not quite there. To quote Sid Meier, "A game is a series of interesting choices." It's hard to make a good game with a great plot: the better the plot, the more you restrict the player's choices. It's not impossible, but it's hard.
Plenty of games have great characters and excellent world-building. Quite a few pose interesting questions, make you face hard dilemmas and leave you pondering long after you're done playing. Several make you immerse yourself in the world and identify with the characters so much that a particular event in their plot will provoke very strong feelings.
But none of those have a plot you can take and make a good movie out of it. Hollywood could very likely pick one of these games and make a great movie based on it, but not by focusing on the plot.
For example, I would be thrilled to watch a movie based on Dragon Age or Fallout. I might like a movie based on Borderlands, perhaps. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy a movie based on The Last of Us or Uncharted or The Talos Principles. And all of those games are among my favorites precisely because I enjoyed their world, characters, themes and choices.
There are plenty of good games that dont give all that much choice to player. Which is why I dont like the "A game is a series of interesting choices." framing. It is true only if you limit definition of games to rpgs or strain definition of "choice" to pretty much anything.
Whether games have great characters is of course subjective, but I have to say that I did not seen them. The best ones tend to be comparable with average book character. (Which is ok, I don't play games for writing, I play them for playing.)
I think that restricting the word "choice" to narrative choices is an overly narrow interpretation of Meier's definition. I see no strain in applying the word "choice" to gameplay choices.
I think BioShock Infinite probably proves your point, too. Compared to the other two entries it limits the player's choices even further and simplifies gameplay even more, but has a much more compelling story. Unfortunately, the story would probably not be as compelling were the player not led by the nose through it.
FTR, I had the most fun playing BioShock 2, but I still like Infinite the most.
Maybe the solution is to have a video game movie that highlights the choices taken by the character. Make the decision points important to the movie, rather than remaking the overall storyline.
> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for.
I would phrase this differently. The interesting parts of the game stories emerge from actions and choices made by the player, not the parts of the story that are actually written. I don't mean that the writers on games aren't doing a good job. Just the opposite, actually: they know how to write the right bits to keep the game interesting, and to help the player work with the game to create interesting stories.
Depends which game. FF7, Baldur's gate and portal have great plots. It's just that good plots take a lot of time and don't make as much money. So producers request them to be removed from games, movies, tv shows, etc.
Why would you bother making a plot when you can make bank with Transformer ?
> Mostly because videogame plot lines aren't as good as we give them credit for.
I wouldn't agree with that. Sure, AAA-level blockbuster video games have simplistic, unoriginal and derivative stories and that's what most gamers play unfortunately, but there well-written games are definitely out there.
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 were both better written than any Star Wars movie by a long stretch.
Planescape: Torment is probably the best written game I've ever played, and playing it almost feels like you're reading a novel at times because the world-building and especially the dialogue is so fleshed-out and thoughtful. This game takes a huge dump over the writing in most movies I've seen.
I mean, that's just two examples. I'm a huge sucker for games with a great story regardless of the genre, but genre is a limiting factor in well-written stories.
You generally don't get much of a story in an RTS for example. You are most certainly never going to get a good story from a beat-em up like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.
Agree, and on top of that isn't it interesting that the more successful game movie adaptations are in those areas where the game plot was thin or non-existent. Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter both fit into that - Little to no plot for the games, then movies come along and are probably successful because they're not so constrained.
Not just video game movies, but also movies based on books about video games.
Having read Ready Player One and then seeing the movie, it's like they didn't even try to capture what made the book successful. The book had clues that were hard for the characters to figure out, but in the movie, it was basically trivial for them.
They should have done 3 movies, each one focusing on obtaining a single key and opening its respective gate. It would have left plenty of room for character development and the underlying love story that are in the book. They could have been Netflix movies too.
I think the incentives behind mainstream film-making would make that impossible. Studios are risk averse, they would rather focus on what makes a book marketable and palatable to the masses than successful, especially when dealing with a property without a guaranteed audience. No studio in their right mind would fund a trilogy based on a book few people would have heard of prior to the first film adaptation.
It might work on an alternative platform like Netflix, but not out of the studio system.
Wreck-it is not a video game movie in the sense that it adapts the original storyline of a video game to a movie, it is a movie about characters living in a video game. It is good though.
There's at least one example of something that's even worse. Street Fighter: The Game: The Movie: The Game is as horrible as it sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4UdQVYkCZg
I still have hope. It took many decades before we entered the golden age of comic book movies, and while I don't think the wait will be as long, I think we're still not quite there yet with video games. What makes a good video game movie is what makes any movie good: when the creative team behind the endeavor believes in it and is tied to the source material. Read some of Nolan's early interviews before Batman Begins comes out and you'll get a sense of that.
I would love to see a Bioshock movie done right, or honestly a proper Metal Gear film. But if the filmmakers don't relate to the material or see it as more than just another narrative engine, we'll get the dime-a-dozen action flicks that try to hype up a few moments without capturing what makes so many VG experiences special.
They're working on that (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, guy who did Kong: Skull Island). I have no idea how you could possibly turn Metal Gear into a movie that is appealing to people who haven't played the games, but he seems to be a huge fan of the series, and has claimed to have "cracked the code" about how to make an appealing movie based on a video game, in the same way that Hollywood has cracked the code for making comic book movies. He's also working with Hideo Kojima. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Mulling over the concept, I think the only way to direct a quality Metal Gear film is to ditch the idea of mass appeal and intentionally attempt to create a cult classic that captures the spirit and story of the original, not unlike Dredd or the new Blade Runner film. And with the correct marketing and angle, hopefully crossover into mainstream appeal like Mad Max: Fury Road. Tricky, but there's a first time for everything.
Alternatively, they could go The Shining/2001: A Space Odyssey route and just make a very good film that doesn't resemble the original work very much. But Vogt-Roberts is not the Kubrick for that, nor does he seem like the type to piss off original authors.
A Bioshock movie would be very hard to get right because so much of the plot revolves around free will and choice, which is of course entirely missing in film. However there was a book [1] set in the Bioshock universe which could work.
This article makes it seem like it's almost inevitable for video game movies to be bad, almost as if there's some objective formula which dooms video game movies to failure. For example, the author mentions something like: "stray too far from the original and you get weird movies that alienate fans, but stick too closely to the original and you get something boring and overly game-like." Seems like a false dichotomy to me.
There's definitely a way to create a highly-compelling side story that "fulfills" the promise of an original series without being overly constrained by it. For example, Tell Tale Studios is a game company that is quite famous for making good side stories that latch onto existing franchises, and their Walking Dead video game is one of the best video game storylines I've ever played through. It seems like it's quite possible to turn good movies and good tv shows into compelling video games; surely this is possible in reverse as well! It's also really easy for me to imagine an alternate universe where video game adaptations are like comic-book or novel adaptations, which are capable of performing quite well.
I do think that making good movies that are entertaining and have artistic merit is always hard, and since the problem of making good movies is already not easy, adding additional constraints from a video game premise probably makes it more difficult, especially since film types are probably more likely to be passionate lovers of comics and books than they are to be passionate gamers. There's probably also a problem with the prestige of video game titles that makes it difficult to find good writing talent.
So many video game movie projects are missing the simple question, "why?" So many of these games are inspired by movies in the first place, and their stories are mostly just cliches based on their source material. It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal
You'd think so, but Michael Bay's Transformers franchise is widely despised by critics and fans (and rightly so), and also makes hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars worldwide.
When you have audacity, nostalgia and guaranteed merchandising potential you don't need the movie to be good, unfortunately.
I have to think the people who keep coming back for one installment after another don't despise the movies. And in fact I remember being dragged to Transformers II by an ex who really wanted to see it because she enjoyed the first one.
quite a few in the filmsphere and in decision making positions in holywood itself still care significantly about the art of film, independantly from the money thats brought in.
Yes, because someone else already paid to get all the branding and name recognition. They're just drafting off it, via higher reward with lower risk than an un-branded new thing.
I can't seem to find anything more recent than June 2016 on the so-called Tetris Trilogy (though I admit to not looking very hard), but this fake Tetris movie trailer from 2012 is something that I think could actually be interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhwGEa7507g
You might enjoy the podcast 'How did this get made'. Three comedians rip on the best of the worst. They have great chemistry and Jason Manzoukous is probably the funniest person on the planet.
That was really enjoyable to watch. Theres something about a 'bad' movie that is relaxing and sincere in its attempt to put on a show. Id say its akin to watching your 5 year old nephews pageant or something, yes its 'bad' on the scale of believability, but an enjoyable experience nevertheless.
I think that, like Mars Attacks and Starship Troopers, it's a movie that one benefitted a lot from expecting a B- or C, and being pleasantly surprised by a B (or B+)-ish experience.
If you read the novel, you get the impression Heinlein actually supports strong barriers to citizenship and other governmental ideals seen in the movie. It praises meritocracy but doesn't really touch on how to avoid corruption, besides being in an existential war against bugs (and skinnies, not seen in the movie).
> If you read the novel, you get the impression Heinlein actually supports strong barriers to citizenship and other governmental ideals seen in the movie.
No, I read the novel, and didn't get that impression at all. (Nor did the novel contain strong barriers to citizenship; it simply portrayed a society which retained the [near universal, in the time and society in which it was written] idea that citizenship required a commitment to service, while reversing the [similarly generally accepted] idea that citizenship was mandatory and automatic with birth.)
And especially I don't think the descriptions equate to simple endorsement after reading lots of Heinlein, where to maintain that shallow attitude toward his work I'd have to think that Heinlein rapidly cycled through deep devotion to a wide range of radically contradictory ideologies. He certainly has certain themes and ideas that he liked to remix that had some relation to his actual political views, but, at least in his fiction, he doesn't seem to be given to simple presentation of what he sees as an ideal.
One thing that comes up a lot in these discussions: a lot of people (not saying this is you) got the impression that the society in the novel requires military service to gain citizenship. It's worth mentioning that the novel is pretty specific that the condition of citizenship is service, period: you have to be willing to sacrifice a few years of your life in service to your nation, and they will find something for anyone willing to serve, no matter what disabilities they may have. The protagonist only chooses the military because he doesn't have any aptitudes to speak of beyond "reasonably physically fit."
As someone who read the novel after seeing the movie, I can see why people who loved the book were disappointed by the movie. The movie, to me, was a hilarious parody of a propaganda-heavy war machine (which might also be why I find Warhammer 40k's Ciaphas Cain novels so funny).
That might be one of the first times that I learned to enjoy both a movie and a book separately, even if the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book. Now, I actively enjoy things like that, which are faithful in only a few of the dimensions of the original.
> the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book.
The movie was pretty much completely conceived before anyone pointed out a superficial resemblance between certain elements of it and the book, which led to a (sadly, successful) effort to secure rights to the book, Verhoeven reading a small part of the beginning of the book and tossing it in disgust, some light plot and character changes to justify the connection, and then slapping the title of the book onto the movie.
> Starship Troopers was an A+ movie masquerading as a B movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.
It's all about whether you've played the game. I can watch the movie knowing/accepting what the plot is (there's a tournament, people have to fight - just sit back and watch shit go down) and the characters (there's going to be a humanoid reptile etc).
All of Paul W.S. Anderson video-game movies are entertaining AF. Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs Predator. ALL well crafted & inspired movies. They're not going to win Cannes Palm d'Or, but they will hit the spot.
Ah, that's the folly! I wasn't even really aware of the franchise (movie-wise).
As with many other franchises, the follow-ups aren't worth watching.
It's always refreshing to see movie directors make a great movie that has a potential for mediocre sequels, but not give in to that temptation (e.g. Matrix).
First movie was pretty good, second was solid, then they went downhill from there. I didn’t hate the last one but that is definitely a case of coming in with very low expectations and having then slightly beaten.
I think that was based on a comic book, so it may not be relevant except to point out that Holywood doesn't automatically make great films even when not adapting games.
> There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
Or some capability of the new format.
Pulling standalone creative works forward into modernity is interesting. Some of my favorite movies are adapted from plays written before film. The timeline is shorter with video games <> movies, but AAA games are already cinematic and VR is basically here (needs lower hardware cost).
How would your favorite composer have used a synthesizer?
Many of those premises sound fine though. Jean Claude Va Damme mad three different movies with the plot of Bloodsport, which in the first place wasn't much different from Enter the Dragon. Plenty of people enjoyed them.
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
Rampage's plot: "Three people are turned into giant monsters and start destroying cities." That's a pretty good B-movie plot. Do a good job making the rubber monster suits and that's half the film right there.
We're all debating various complex semantics when the only thing that ultimately really matters is talent... who ultimately is in control of these building blocks. Talent with the director, talent with the screenplay, talent with the acting, etc.
There has been plenty of dumb plots, stories, concepts, etc that have been turned into great movies by talented people. Reservoir Dogs, Clerks 1, Napoleon Dynamite, The Abyss, etc would all sound dumb, boring, or cliche on paper, but were made highly watchable by talented film makers working in their prime.
Just like startups, the only thing that matters is people, not how clever your original idea is. You could have the perfect movie idea, which many big budget have had (which translate well into trailers and per-release marketing), but turn out to be awful once it's turned into the 1.5hr+ long final product.
The reason why doesn't have to do with quality, it has to do with built in marketing.
There is a reason that you see your childhood sold back to you 25 years later when you can be full of nostalgia and introduce your own kids to it fresh.
Supporting evidence: the Rampage movie, "Toys of the 80s" (or whatever that Netflix series" is, etc. I'm not ashamed that my 6 year old knows who Orko is and that five kids can drive a sword weilding group of mechanical lions to defend the universe.
Also GI Joe, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Scooby Doo, Transformers, Garfield, The Cat in the Hat, Smurfs, Star Wars, Terminator, Star Trek, Karate Kid, Spiderman, X-Men, Battleship, Speed Racer...
> So many video game movie projects are missing the simple question, "why?" So many of these games are inspired by movies in the first place, and their stories are mostly just cliches based on their source material.
I agree.
> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works and you can successfully create something new and wonderful when doing so.
> If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good."
The Nation Treasure movies were pretty well received despite being "Indiana Jones without a whip or Nazis". Apart from Indiana Jones being an archeologist tomb raider, the similarities with the Tomb Raider franchise are minimal. The reason the first Tomb Raider movies were so poorly received is because they just bad 90s action movies skinned with Tomb Raider IP, lipstick on a pig.
Looking at the new Tomb Raider movie's trailer, I'm betting it's going to fail as well. It might actually be a decent movie but fans of the game will hate it for rebooting the story and people who don't play video games will avoid it for being a video game movie.
In my opinion, successful adaptations work when they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is a great example. The book itself is a bit dated with 19th century science about vivisection that is preposterous to even the layman today. The premise though is sound and 1996 movie adaptation remains true to it while updating the science and as a result it is a wonderful adaptation.
The the Marvel Cinematic universe has been so successful despite plots that beat a dead horse, you could even argue that they repeat their own plots in subsequent movies. Despite that they're a resounding success because they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it by bringing the action to life in a way that's impossible in comics.
There are plenty of video games that have interesting characters, stories, or even premises that could be adapted into films, I think the main problem is that Hollywood is uninterested in making a good movie, they just looking to cache in on the IP.
> It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
I agree with your sentiment but disagree with your assertion that the innovation must come from the source. The play Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story in 1961 and was adapted into at least 10 films since yet the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet received critical acclaim despite retaining almost all of the dialog from the original play.
> "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason.
Why not? The Harry Potter series seems to have done pretty well for itself despite not really bringing anything really new to the table in terms of story telling or worlds. What makes the series so beloved?
I think there are plenty of video games that could inspire a decent movie. The universe that the Portal and Half-life games exists in has so much potential. I could see a compelling film being made about Barney, Alyx Vance and the City 1...
>> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
>All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
(I think it was) David Wong once pointed out about say the trench run in Star Wars: you fly down... and crash. You fly down and shoot the tie fighters and get shot down... You fly down shoot the ties, avoid the turrets and die... fly down and die... fly down shoot the fighters avoid the turrets and Vader kills you... fly down and die... fly down and get hit by the turrets...
Games allow you to fail, a lot, repeatedly and thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie.
Books, paintings (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) don't alow you to fail; they can have the same structure as a film. Interactive media IN WHICH YOU CAN FAIL however requires it's own thing.
Most games will allow you to try until you succeed, very few accept failure and progress the story. When they do, people generally do not accept it and retry anyways [1].
> thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie.
I would argues that the much hated quicktime event has been used successfully to give users interaction and have the same flow and tension in a story.
The reality is that most people play through a game in a linear fashion, they may fail but they replay instead of accepting the failure, if that's even an option. Thus to the character and story, there was no failure.
Even still a solid premise can be adapted to either medium successfully. The movie Memento and the video game Braid are fundamentally the same idea presented in radically different ways with very different stories. The impact of the twist at the end of both though is equally poignant.
I think you overlook the importance of execution in filmmaking. Especially for genre films (which most video game movies would probably be), the premise (the “why?”) isn’t really that important, and even the thinnest premise is possible to execute well.
I think Mass Effect trilogy is fairly original and does away with a lot of the space sci-fi cliches like humans being the ruling class of the galaxy, or all species having a united voice, etc. I’d love to see it made into a movie.
When i think about Mass Effect, what comes to mind are these long sequences in the Citadel where you do nothing more than talk, learning about the biology, technology qnd geopolitics of the game's universe. I don't think this kind of content would fit a blockbuster movie, and without it what remains is a bunch of space marines shooting aliens.
Actually the looong cutscenes where you cannot do anything, is one of the reasons I think it’d be a good movie. If you think about it it’s a very interactive story. Yes, you have choices like most RPGs but they don’t really matter at the end.
The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
Specifically about Mass Effect: I think the difficulty here is that the ME universe is pretty vanilla by scifi standards. The good part about the games is how they present a big universe and fill it up with lore and characters for you to explore and because of it (at least for me) the game's immersion goes very smoothly from "I'm playing a video game" to "I'm commander fucking Shepard and I'm saving this galaxy whether it wants to or not".
I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
I view Mass Effect as KOTOR without a Star Wars license. It has always felt to me like Bioware wanted a parallel universe to a popular universe, one they could have creative control over. Kind of like Warcraft was basically Warhammer without license and Starcraft feels in many ways similar to WH40k.
Warcraft and Starcraft are similar to Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 only at the superficial level of having several races and cultures fighting a multilateral war.
Races are similar, but generic and traditional; space marines and hive-mind insectoid aliens, for example, are an old standard of science fiction (Starship Troopers has both).
The more peculiar elements of the settings, on the other hand, are vastly different, particularly the basic conflict: crowded races and invasions, with peaceful and deranged people on all sides, in Warcraft and Starcraft, feel very different from the fanatical mutual destruction effort of the Emperor and the Chaos Gods of Warhammer and Warhammer 40000.
Movies and games are sufficiently different that the the key to making a good "video game" movie may be to pick a property that gives more options than it takes away.
For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting.
With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle.
Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
> Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage...
Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world.
If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it?
Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)
The challenge with this is that a
studio would be alienating fans
A standalone Boba Fett movie would coexist with Star Wars without much interaction with the main plot, but still attract fans as he's a cult character. The studio would benefit from the IP's profitable reputation, but they'd retain the freedom do new things and attract new audiences.
That's a bit of a tortured example: Boba Fett was highly popular, a named character, and was featured in literature and promotional materials. Mass Effect has no character remotely as iconic or well established as Boba Fett, much less a side character, much less "a different angle".
Star Was illustrates my point quite nicely: after a couple decades of world building they're already plumbing diminishing returns in one of the worlds largest and most popular IPs only one or two stories removed from their main narrative. I have high hopes for the Han Solo prequel, but Disney isn't putting money behind "alternative" Star Wars narratives until the nostalgia well is tapped, and even then they're going full-court on a trilogy.
"I have high hopes for the Han Solo prequel, but Disney isn't putting money behind "alternative" Star Wars narratives until the nostalgia well is tapped, and even then they're going full-court on a trilogy."
"Humanity makes contact with the galactic community of intelligent life and claws its way to respect and acceptance with the help of plucky heroes". That is a very common trope employed by many, Star Trek among them. It's a fine set of games but as a story for a movie, it's as generic as it gets.
I can't recall anything that was surprising in Mass Effect.
It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic.
I really don't understand the appeal of this game.
Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2.
And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.
So true. Fallout 1+2 are my favorite RPGs of all times. They had real choice for example: you could talk your way out of different situations and even get better over all outcomes (vault city and the ghouls if I remember correctly)
ah and humor- not forget humor :)
Honestly I really wanted to love Fallout 3. I was so excited when it was out, and I tried very hard to get into the game. But it was so shallow compared to the originals. And so short.
It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done.
Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
Well, New Vegas had a few people from the original fallout working on it afaik. And it's made by Obsidian, who made the excellent Pillars of Eternity which you already praised :)
NV is widely considered to be the best neo Fallout. Additionally, people seem to prefer either FO3 or NV, but rarely both. So if you found FO3 lacking (as I did), then it's likely you'll enjoy NV.
With the caveat that it's a nine year old game at this point.
There have been Scifi Novels that undid that trope before it became a trope. Esp. in the latest Perry Rhodan Novels the humans on earth are not really that big anymore. It's not a new idea.
"Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.
What's really interesting is that there are a number of video game franchises with nuanced backstories that have spawned successful and surprisingly well-written novels. So it's definitely possible to take a video game and turn it into a book. And there are plenty of books that get turned into excellent movies or TV shows (of course, there are plenty that get turned into bad ones, FWIW).
Books like Eric Nylund's Halo: The Fall of Reach, Greg Bear's Forerunner Saga (Halo again), or Brandon Sanderson's Infinity Blade: Awakening are all pretty well-respected and did well in terms of sales. Probably because they manage to avoid falling into the temptation to simply recreate the game experience as a book. They use the game's plot as a starting point to influence the story without dictating it.
Of course, by deviating away from "the game" as fans experienced it, you risk alienating them because the final product doesn't match up with what they expect. And because the same fans are probably the reason why the studio is willing to finance the movie in the first place, I can sort of understand why Hollywood repeatedly tries to hew closely to the source game even though that approach has repeatedly screwed them.
The peculiar thing is that they face a somewhat similar situation when they turn a book into a movie. And yet, Hollywood is more than willing to take risks and deviate away from the source material when necessary. So what about video games in particular scares the studios away from doing the same?
It may be the similarity of the medium that hamstrings Hollywood. Going from prose to a movie tends to absolutely force a lot of compromises. You no longer really have the option of extensive narration, seeing into characters' thoughts, etc, and the whole thing has to fit into 200 minutes at the outside. A video game already operates under similar constraints as a movie, so it's possible to create a movie that's very similar. You just take a recording of a well-done play-through as your outline. It could be that without the excuse provided by the drastic change in medium, Hollywood types lose the nerve to do what's necessary.
I would argue that the medium of video games is more free to explore a rich story than either books or movies, video games benefit from the ability to explore story and lore asynchronously from the main plot, with unique branching, and at the players leisure, so appealing to a wide audience with every detail isn't necessary.
Some games can even continue story telling for hundreds of hours, meandering through dozens of different storylines, arcs, characters, minute details, (Skyrim, Fallout,..). Some games even have their own books inside the games that the character player can read!
The medium really is quite a bit more flexible than a movie. Where I think some comments are suggesting that games are not story rich enough to translate into movies and that's certainly true in some cases, I would argue that the types of story telling are simply not always directly compatible with a linear movie story line.
Most comments here just seem to generally crap on all video game movies to date (correct) and surmise that it's a losing concept (wrong).
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
When adapting a book the set and costume designers, directors of photography, casting and special effects have a lot of flexibility to collaborate on the tone and feel of the movie.
In a video game situation most of these people need to look at the game and build a world that looks like it’s ripped from the game, or the fans get cranky. But once the director does this, isn’t he/she tainted by the source material?
To be fair, Hollywood is improving. Their first attempt was the Super Mario Brothers movie, which was so bad that it's difficult to understand how they finished it.
Actually, in some ways, Hardcore Henry (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3072482/) was a great video game movie. It has lots of problems, but it captures both the feel of a video game with the power of film. While not based on a specific game, it's easy to see many gaming cliches (intentionally) in the film.
Agreed. I kind of reluctantly started to watch the movie some night, expecting a glorified first person POV parkour video.
I absolutely loved the concept of the "Jimmy" character, it made the entire movie super satisfying. The topic of surrogate bodies, whether virtual, robotic, or in this case biologic, is very interesting to me.
"Edge of Tomorrow" is a fantastic video game movie in spirit. The Groundhog-Day-Formula is not new, but it nails the game experience of having a "savepoint" and getting better and better until you master the bullet hell level.
I'm guessing Jumanji is the Welcome to the Jungle one, and if so, I completely agree. I was thinking about it in the theater that it may be the best video game movie and it isn't even about a video game property (except a made up one).
There are lots of good comments here and I don't know where my response belongs, but I still think a good movie is possible.
I know it was a commercial disaster, but Final Fantasy is the closest we've come IMO. The series has a great aesthetic and style that doesn't feel too derivative of anything else, and it's known for having great plots and characters (by video game standards). If anything, they strayed too far from the source. Make it about a group of adventurers in a weird cyberpunk/fantasy universe with outrageous haircuts fighting an insane demigod and I think it can work. Obviously that works in the games.
What you have to do is take games that have strong styles already and adapt the feeling and personality, not the mechanics.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadLots of games tell stories these days. There's no fundamental reason those stories couldn't be adopted to the silver screen. Of course many of these stories aren't really very good, but the same can also be said of any medium. There are elements that might not translate, but that's true of any adaptation. For instance Bioshock's infamous "Would you kindly" plot point won't come though the same way in a movie.
A movie needs a couple hours of focused plot, and a limited number of in-depth characters whose motivations can reasonably be covered in this short time. A blockbuster game generally involves a much larger cast of characters, and a much, much longer/wider plot story to cover the hours.
If you leave the story as-is and just cut the "sidequests", then the movie will be full of characters who are barely introduced and whose motivations make no sense to those who haven't played the game and don't know the backstory; and if you cut the story to be "movie-sized", then it will have little resemblance to the original, as key points will need to be drastically altered.
FFVII: Advent Children is a great example of this. Half the characters from the original game just come stumbling into the plot with no introduction or explanation.
And books often are even harder to translate the story aspects for because they usually take place over much longer time spans than movies or video games. Many movies made from books seem to have character relationships that seem like they should have taken much longer to develop because of it.
If I were making a movie about that subject (and maybe this will make it clear why I'm not a producer), I'd go for more of an "Adaptation" style film. Viewers can't control time? Play it up, by (visually) admitting that the game powers like "rewind" are done on film through multiple takes, and stunt men, and editing. That's how you translate game to film, and this game mechanic provides the perfect opportunity.
So you've got a normal action film for the first X minutes, and then there's a fight scene, and Jake trips and flubs it, and we hear someone call "cut!", and you see everything freezes while the crew rush in to reset everything to 10 seconds earlier, and they run it again. The first time this happens, it's super quick, so the audience is left wondering if they really saw it or not. As the film goes on, it happens more often, and more extensively. Maybe sometimes the actor tries several times and then gives up and runs off stage, and a stunt man runs in. Maybe sometimes you expand and see that the whole thing is happening on an editing workstation, and they move clips around to make it look like everything worked, and then they hit "play" and you're back in the story.
Then at the very end, it zooms out to show the filmmakers watching what we just saw, and they say "Nah, nobody would ever believe that it all just worked out perfectly the first time like this". Fin.
If the whole point of PoP:SoT is the protagonist's ability to control time, film already has a way to do that. Don't try to just embed an old mechanic in the new medium. That's like building an interpreter for C, and calling it a day. You've got a native JMP here, so use it.
Great humor potential, though it'd get stale and instead become the story.
For example, I can't stand musicals, because I think characters breaking out into song and dance every 5 minutes destroys any attempt at immersiveness or believability. But lots of people love them, and don't find this incongruity problematic. So I don't think breaking from the flow of the main story necessarily breaks the story.
Did the structure of "Adaptation" detract from its 'immersiveness'? I'd say it's the wrong question to ask.
My purpose was not humor, but to pull back the curtain and show the absurdity inherent in all action movies, and the work involved. Satire can be humorous, but that's not really the goal. I'd still love watching Jackie Chan outtakes even if his movies weren't comedic.
I have no use for yet another (whitewashed) action movie. Then again, as I said, there's probably a reason I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker.
I know a bunch of folks who walked out feeling cheated or confused.
I think most of the issue is that people want a) a story b) to be entertained and c) to forget about the outside world for a bit.
Anything that fills these boxes is good for mass consumption (from Hollywood producer/ purely dollars point of view). Enlightening the subject or shocking them with with new points of view are entirely stretch goals.
It was an incredibly fun watch.
I mean, it doesn't even succeed at convincing the audience they should root for the Assassins instead of the Templars.
It's like they assumed everyone who was watching who didn't already know the story would be too stupid to understand it.
On the topic, I do believe that there are worthy stories in video games that can be translated to the screen not just for those who don't play games, but also for gamers who want to relive some of the story without the tedious bits in between (like farming for XP or upgrading).
The new tomb raider was probably the closest so far. I liked the tie-ins with the game and the actress did a great job of bringing the game character to life. The few things I didn't like were some of the acting and one-dimensional supporting characters. Also some scenes were just contrived, but I suppose that creeps in according to budget and timing.
Also, Mortal Kombat (1995) is a good film.
Maybe it's best just to listen to the soundtrack instead.
The overt sexism (and threats) towards Sonya are pretty upsetting. I'd forgotten about that, and as a teenager I wrote it off as "well I guess he's just a Bad Guy". As an adult (and parent) now, I really feel like that kind of messaging is pretty toxic and unnecessary. (Heck, just the revenge motive of he-killed-her-partner would have been enough.)
There's a lot of writing that on some levels are Bad -- low-dimensional characters, etc -- but in the context of a movie character, wasn't all that bad. The characters were in many ways as much a caricature as their video game characters were. Johnny Cage is such a caricature of what one would imagine as the intersection of a spoiled (80s or 90s?) Movie Star with a martial artist -- in many ways, he seemed a direct spoof of Van Damme or other actors. And yet, I liked that they gave his character some redeeming qualities (IIRC).
As an action film, I still enjoyed the fight choreography for most of the fights, even if you have to have some huge suspension of disbelief about things like who would want to be one of Shang Tsung's disposable minions. :) I mean, what's the benefits and compensation package for that look like?
To this day the fight with Reptile is one of my favorite action sequences in any film I've seen.
For another example, see Final Fantasy: Advent Children which is a sequel to Final Fantasy 7. It's pretty enjoyable.
And to be fair, most films based on other media don't directly translate their source material either. Oh sure, novel based films do, but most comic book movies seem to have plots written specifically for the movie, with elements from various comic issues mixed in. And most based on TV series usually have new stories too.
Another good example is the Phoenix Wright movie (in Japan). Both are excellent love letters to their fans.
Video games get away with a lot less plot and character development because of their interactive nature and because they are graded on a curve. Many classic games have basically no character development at all.
People think adapting a game into a movie should be a natural transition but it isn’t at all. They are totally different forms.
The "Doom" movie is arguably an excellent adaptation of the video game. But that doesn't make for much of a movie.
2) See the part about grading games on a curve.
Could be worse, you could be adopting classic boardgames. The Battleship movie was gloriously dumb. Monopoly would come across as a critique of capitalism. Actually, the Clue movie was a lot of fun.
Some things just shouldn't be live-action movies. Look at all the anime movie failures. They were perfectly fine in their original animated format. No need for live action, except to keep people in the movie industry employed.
I watched it out of a sheer morbid curiosity, and haven't played any Warcraft title newer than II: Tides of Darkness. I thought the movie was crap.
But maybe I and critics just aren't the audience for these movies. Seems most people who saw it liked it. Doesn't that make it at least "Good"?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_g...
They would just name drop locations and people, expecting you to know what they were. It was just mostly a fan service, "here is your movie, loyal fans!" types.
It still wasn't "great" even if you were a fan, but I can't imagine how bad a lot of it would have come off as if you didn't follow things pretty closely to begin with.
I've only got pop culture knowledge of World Of Warcraft, and the way they explained most parts of the movie was really hard to follow. They needed:
- More world-building, geography was hard to follow, jumping around too much.
- Better character introduction, characters would just appear, banking on fans recognising them.
- Less assumed knowledge...
The whole movie came off a bit amateurish in how the story was told...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/02/warcraft-fi...
I'd suggest it was the exception to the rule. Sure, it's not Oscar material, but it was a thoroughly well made movie - and the ratings support this.
I'm a fan of the Warcraft lore (though not where WoW took it). I found it pretty awful too. It seemed to lack a story - "stuff" just seemed to happen. It was like a 6-year old telling a story: there was no coherence or continuity. I've liked tons of movies that have done poorly with critics but a common theme across all of them is that they had a storyline.
To put this in perspective, I enjoyed Doom (2005) which is renowned for being one of the worst game movies around.
I played WoW for years starting with US open beta (I'm from the EU) But the movie was just childish and simple. I'm starting to think that I moved on from simple plots to some more interesting things. Like Asimov instead of Star Wars...
The most successful videogame movies tend towards genre films like Mortal Kombat (the film) and Resident Evil (the series).
Of course, let's not forget that it can be hard to make a good movie, period.
I supposed if Hollywood had some confidence about making video game movies they might be very excited about getting a pre-made trilogy, but since their lack of confidence is well-founded in fact I don't see this happening any time soon.
A Game of Thrones-style "Sigil: City of Doors" series might work. Don't reuse the Nameless One or the plot of the game. Maybe reuse some characters like Annah. Like the game developers did, use the setting and make up new characters and plots.
Maybe before the show airs, put a series of entertaining shorts up on YouTube that introduce the city, the unusual beings resident there, the factions, and finally the main characters of the series.
Any takers?
I think you're right that video games often sacrifice storytelling for gameplay, which I definitely don't mind.
I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.
The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie
I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.
I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.
There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.
I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.
Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.
Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.
And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.
Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.
Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.
If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):
* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion
* Bloody Baron sub-plot
* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion
* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad
* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz
* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory
With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.
I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.
How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.
You can't actually lose Firewatch can you?
I did really enjoy playing it, although I thought it was rather expensive for a game that I finished in about 3 hours.
I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.
Edit: also overwatch has a HUGE lore behind it.
And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.
Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.
But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.
IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.
But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.
I would posit that perhaps the filtration system of making a wide audience film has more impact on how the screenplay is adapted and I haven't noticed that being discussed.
Yes, it's not merely "mostly", it's nearly all.
Except if we talk about some old-style adventure games (and even those aren't any narrative masterpieces either, they barely make it into "adult fiction" level), video games are just some very basic plot skeleton -- as opposed to a plot.
If they have nuance and atmosphere, that's in their visual, audio and interactive elements (as opposed to the plot and narration).
Taking a complete list of every interactive program that qualifies as a video game and saying 99% of them don't have a plot seems similar to saying 99% of books don't have a narrative or plot.
Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I thought the parameter of -games that were intended to actually narrate a story- was heavily implied in this thread.
Same with movies, books, comics, ... but the top is good. The Last Of Us ffs...
Plenty of games have great characters and excellent world-building. Quite a few pose interesting questions, make you face hard dilemmas and leave you pondering long after you're done playing. Several make you immerse yourself in the world and identify with the characters so much that a particular event in their plot will provoke very strong feelings.
But none of those have a plot you can take and make a good movie out of it. Hollywood could very likely pick one of these games and make a great movie based on it, but not by focusing on the plot.
For example, I would be thrilled to watch a movie based on Dragon Age or Fallout. I might like a movie based on Borderlands, perhaps. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy a movie based on The Last of Us or Uncharted or The Talos Principles. And all of those games are among my favorites precisely because I enjoyed their world, characters, themes and choices.
Whether games have great characters is of course subjective, but I have to say that I did not seen them. The best ones tend to be comparable with average book character. (Which is ok, I don't play games for writing, I play them for playing.)
FTR, I had the most fun playing BioShock 2, but I still like Infinite the most.
I would phrase this differently. The interesting parts of the game stories emerge from actions and choices made by the player, not the parts of the story that are actually written. I don't mean that the writers on games aren't doing a good job. Just the opposite, actually: they know how to write the right bits to keep the game interesting, and to help the player work with the game to create interesting stories.
As a friend of adventure games and visual novels I have to disagree. Here are some games that in my opinion have great stories:
- The Longest Journey
- Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward)
- the Blackwell series
- To the Moon
Why would you bother making a plot when you can make bank with Transformer ?
I wouldn't agree with that. Sure, AAA-level blockbuster video games have simplistic, unoriginal and derivative stories and that's what most gamers play unfortunately, but there well-written games are definitely out there.
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 were both better written than any Star Wars movie by a long stretch.
Planescape: Torment is probably the best written game I've ever played, and playing it almost feels like you're reading a novel at times because the world-building and especially the dialogue is so fleshed-out and thoughtful. This game takes a huge dump over the writing in most movies I've seen.
I mean, that's just two examples. I'm a huge sucker for games with a great story regardless of the genre, but genre is a limiting factor in well-written stories.
You generally don't get much of a story in an RTS for example. You are most certainly never going to get a good story from a beat-em up like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.
Having read Ready Player One and then seeing the movie, it's like they didn't even try to capture what made the book successful. The book had clues that were hard for the characters to figure out, but in the movie, it was basically trivial for them.
They should have done 3 movies, each one focusing on obtaining a single key and opening its respective gate. It would have left plenty of room for character development and the underlying love story that are in the book. They could have been Netflix movies too.
It might work on an alternative platform like Netflix, but not out of the studio system.
They even made an actual arcade game for the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvErIWbwZI
And the way it shows other characters, especially Q-Bert and Zangief, was hilarious.
Maybe if someone makes a movie based on Zork - basically 3 hours of Star Wars "crawl"?
https://vimeo.com/110531141
Zork Nemesis movie trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQxovf4r-is
I would love to see a Bioshock movie done right, or honestly a proper Metal Gear film. But if the filmmakers don't relate to the material or see it as more than just another narrative engine, we'll get the dime-a-dozen action flicks that try to hype up a few moments without capturing what makes so many VG experiences special.
They're working on that (Jordan Vogt-Roberts, guy who did Kong: Skull Island). I have no idea how you could possibly turn Metal Gear into a movie that is appealing to people who haven't played the games, but he seems to be a huge fan of the series, and has claimed to have "cracked the code" about how to make an appealing movie based on a video game, in the same way that Hollywood has cracked the code for making comic book movies. He's also working with Hideo Kojima. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Alternatively, they could go The Shining/2001: A Space Odyssey route and just make a very good film that doesn't resemble the original work very much. But Vogt-Roberts is not the Kubrick for that, nor does he seem like the type to piss off original authors.
[1] http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/BioShock:_Rapture_(Novel)
There's definitely a way to create a highly-compelling side story that "fulfills" the promise of an original series without being overly constrained by it. For example, Tell Tale Studios is a game company that is quite famous for making good side stories that latch onto existing franchises, and their Walking Dead video game is one of the best video game storylines I've ever played through. It seems like it's quite possible to turn good movies and good tv shows into compelling video games; surely this is possible in reverse as well! It's also really easy for me to imagine an alternate universe where video game adaptations are like comic-book or novel adaptations, which are capable of performing quite well.
I do think that making good movies that are entertaining and have artistic merit is always hard, and since the problem of making good movies is already not easy, adding additional constraints from a video game premise probably makes it more difficult, especially since film types are probably more likely to be passionate lovers of comics and books than they are to be passionate gamers. There's probably also a problem with the prestige of video game titles that makes it difficult to find good writing talent.
If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good." Mortal Kombat is basically Enter the Dragon with a simpler storyline, so why would you decide to turn it into a movie?
It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film. "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason. It might get a movie greenlit, and it might even make money. Heck, it might even make a TON of money, but it won't make the movie good.
[1] Later iterations of Tomb Raider have been much more feminist, but the original concept was entirely based on sex appeal
When you have audacity, nostalgia and guaranteed merchandising potential you don't need the movie to be good, unfortunately.
Holy crap, this is bad. 3% on Rotten Tomatoes...
I recall watching this a few times while stoned, was insane.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Kombat:_Legacy
No, I read the novel, and didn't get that impression at all. (Nor did the novel contain strong barriers to citizenship; it simply portrayed a society which retained the [near universal, in the time and society in which it was written] idea that citizenship required a commitment to service, while reversing the [similarly generally accepted] idea that citizenship was mandatory and automatic with birth.)
And especially I don't think the descriptions equate to simple endorsement after reading lots of Heinlein, where to maintain that shallow attitude toward his work I'd have to think that Heinlein rapidly cycled through deep devotion to a wide range of radically contradictory ideologies. He certainly has certain themes and ideas that he liked to remix that had some relation to his actual political views, but, at least in his fiction, he doesn't seem to be given to simple presentation of what he sees as an ideal.
That might be one of the first times that I learned to enjoy both a movie and a book separately, even if the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book. Now, I actively enjoy things like that, which are faithful in only a few of the dimensions of the original.
The movie was pretty much completely conceived before anyone pointed out a superficial resemblance between certain elements of it and the book, which led to a (sadly, successful) effort to secure rights to the book, Verhoeven reading a small part of the beginning of the book and tossing it in disgust, some light plot and character changes to justify the connection, and then slapping the title of the book onto the movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.
Applying those words to the Resident Evil sequels surely is some form of crime against humanity
I was about to bring this movie up as a counter-example, but I guess the opinions on this are very much split.
As with many other franchises, the follow-ups aren't worth watching.
It's always refreshing to see movie directors make a great movie that has a potential for mediocre sequels, but not give in to that temptation (e.g. Matrix).
Directors pretty much define the quality of the movies, so it's more important to follow them instead of the franchise itself.
Just Cause 2 was the best "shitty action movie" video game I've ever played!
I'm pretty sure it's just because they want to tap into the large existing fanbase of those games.
Or some capability of the new format.
Pulling standalone creative works forward into modernity is interesting. Some of my favorite movies are adapted from plays written before film. The timeline is shorter with video games <> movies, but AAA games are already cinematic and VR is basically here (needs lower hardware cost).
How would your favorite composer have used a synthesizer?
On the other hand, Rampage seems like something that's hard to work into a movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampage_(2018_film)
It can be good... in the right hands.
We're all debating various complex semantics when the only thing that ultimately really matters is talent... who ultimately is in control of these building blocks. Talent with the director, talent with the screenplay, talent with the acting, etc.
There has been plenty of dumb plots, stories, concepts, etc that have been turned into great movies by talented people. Reservoir Dogs, Clerks 1, Napoleon Dynamite, The Abyss, etc would all sound dumb, boring, or cliche on paper, but were made highly watchable by talented film makers working in their prime.
Just like startups, the only thing that matters is people, not how clever your original idea is. You could have the perfect movie idea, which many big budget have had (which translate well into trailers and per-release marketing), but turn out to be awful once it's turned into the 1.5hr+ long final product.
There is a reason that you see your childhood sold back to you 25 years later when you can be full of nostalgia and introduce your own kids to it fresh.
I agree.
> It's fine in the context of the game, because the player is doing something, but when you put that into a non-interactive medium, the flaws become obvious.
All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works and you can successfully create something new and wonderful when doing so.
> If you take Indiana Jones, turn it into a game with a sexy woman as the main character[1], and then try to make a movie out of it, then of course the critical reaction is going to be "Indiana Jones but not as good."
The Nation Treasure movies were pretty well received despite being "Indiana Jones without a whip or Nazis". Apart from Indiana Jones being an archeologist tomb raider, the similarities with the Tomb Raider franchise are minimal. The reason the first Tomb Raider movies were so poorly received is because they just bad 90s action movies skinned with Tomb Raider IP, lipstick on a pig.
Looking at the new Tomb Raider movie's trailer, I'm betting it's going to fail as well. It might actually be a decent movie but fans of the game will hate it for rebooting the story and people who don't play video games will avoid it for being a video game movie.
In my opinion, successful adaptations work when they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is a great example. The book itself is a bit dated with 19th century science about vivisection that is preposterous to even the layman today. The premise though is sound and 1996 movie adaptation remains true to it while updating the science and as a result it is a wonderful adaptation.
The the Marvel Cinematic universe has been so successful despite plots that beat a dead horse, you could even argue that they repeat their own plots in subsequent movies. Despite that they're a resounding success because they're loyal to the source material and improve upon it by bringing the action to life in a way that's impossible in comics.
There are plenty of video games that have interesting characters, stories, or even premises that could be adapted into films, I think the main problem is that Hollywood is uninterested in making a good movie, they just looking to cache in on the IP.
> It's an issue that comes up in most adaptation, whether it be a book, or a comic, or even a song. There needs to be some reason to do it. Some idea that the source material does that hasn't already been done to death in film.
I agree with your sentiment but disagree with your assertion that the innovation must come from the source. The play Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story in 1961 and was adapted into at least 10 films since yet the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet received critical acclaim despite retaining almost all of the dialog from the original play.
> "This game/movie/book is popular" isn't a good enough reason.
Why not? The Harry Potter series seems to have done pretty well for itself despite not really bringing anything really new to the table in terms of story telling or worlds. What makes the series so beloved?
I think there are plenty of video games that could inspire a decent movie. The universe that the Portal and Half-life games exists in has so much potential. I could see a compelling film being made about Barney, Alyx Vance and the City 1...
>All forms of art are inspired by other forms of art, this is no basis to write them off. Would you dismiss Michelangelo's work because he was influenced by Giovanni? Or Giovanni because he worked under Donatello? Should we just write off all fantasy novels post Tolkien? What about D&D? Or Warhammer? The Matrix was obviously inspired by the cyberpunk universes created by authors like William Gibson, do we just dismiss it?
(I think it was) David Wong once pointed out about say the trench run in Star Wars: you fly down... and crash. You fly down and shoot the tie fighters and get shot down... You fly down shoot the ties, avoid the turrets and die... fly down and die... fly down shoot the fighters avoid the turrets and Vader kills you... fly down and die... fly down and get hit by the turrets...
Games allow you to fail, a lot, repeatedly and thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie. Books, paintings (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) don't alow you to fail; they can have the same structure as a film. Interactive media IN WHICH YOU CAN FAIL however requires it's own thing.
Most games will allow you to try until you succeed, very few accept failure and progress the story. When they do, people generally do not accept it and retry anyways [1].
> thus the story can't have the same tension or structure as a movie.
I would argues that the much hated quicktime event has been used successfully to give users interaction and have the same flow and tension in a story.
The reality is that most people play through a game in a linear fashion, they may fail but they replay instead of accepting the failure, if that's even an option. Thus to the character and story, there was no failure.
Even still a solid premise can be adapted to either medium successfully. The movie Memento and the video game Braid are fundamentally the same idea presented in radically different ways with very different stories. The impact of the twist at the end of both though is equally poignant.
[1] https://www.filfre.net/2018/03/wing-commander-ii/
The learning about background stuff is one thing that the movie makers would have to smooth out. I think the new tomb raider does a good job at balancing backstory and the plot. Assasins creed, not so much.
I think that'd be pretty hard to bring to a non-interactive medium. Sure good novels can be written but again, a film lacks the time to give so much exposition.
For example, Tomb Raider has to be based on Lara Croft raiding tombs, or it's not Tomb Raider. You have your main character, type of action, and key plot points determined before you start, and viewers will compare them to the games. This is very limiting.
With Mass Effect, you have a rather well realized universe in which you could set a movie that would be easily recognized as Mass Effect, without necessarily being forced to use the main characters from the Game or plot points from the game trilogy. You are given settings, races, ship designs, factions, conflicts, etc. that can be explored from a different angle.
Create a movie that coexists with game plots rather than trying to sum them up or replace them and you'll have more freedom to make a movie that's actually good.
Of course, 95% of everything is crap. Maybe we just haven't seen a good video game movie yet because there haven't yet been enough made to beat the odds. Probably a quarter of the number that have been made were directed by Uwe Boll, and those probably shouldn't be counted as serious attempts at making a good movie anyways.
The challenge with this is that a studio would be alienating fans and making a large investment into an IP and then throwing most of that in the garbage...
Mass Effect isn't enough of a name to carry an untried, unanchored, narrative into the mainstream. Most fans of any work have a superficial relationship to the underlying IP, so most people people who walk into a Batman movie are only gonna want to see Batman, not some "good story" told about unrelated people in Batmans world.
If the story is so solid, and it's so exciting you want to put a hundred million dollars behind it, then why share profits with an unrelated IP owner? Change the 'universe', keep the money. If you're going to pay for an IP, why not use it?
Using established IPs is all about risk management. Paying extra for the joy of increasing the risk is how execs end up not execs ;)
Star Was illustrates my point quite nicely: after a couple decades of world building they're already plumbing diminishing returns in one of the worlds largest and most popular IPs only one or two stories removed from their main narrative. I have high hopes for the Han Solo prequel, but Disney isn't putting money behind "alternative" Star Wars narratives until the nostalgia well is tapped, and even then they're going full-court on a trilogy.
Um, Rogue One?
Different stories need different mediums?
It's basically a dumb down Babylon 5 environment, with a dumb down Deus Ex gameplay and a dumb down Hyperion twist, served on a fake open world made of long empty corridors or galaxy trajectories. If the fights were good I would forgive it, but even that is very basic.
I really don't understand the appeal of this game.
Maybe it appeals to people that don't read much SF or played a lot of videos games before 2000 because they don't have reference of anything better ? It's true that today people consider fallout 3 & next as good, while there are only the shadow of 1 and 2.
And I don't say that because "it was better before". Breath of the Wild and Pillar of Eternity prove you can get plenty of quality in today's production.
It's also possible that once you consumed a lot of excellent products you become picky. We are living on a creative golden age after all. And it's hard to come out with something new, so much have been done.
Plenty of things are probably "good enough", but we have had fantastic stuff already, so it's meh to go back. I'm sure if I'm honest, I can fan many so-so titled I enjoyed as a kid because they were new to me.
With the caveat that it's a nine year old game at this point.
"Humans are insignificant" in scifi can probably be traced somewhat into the works of Lovecraft and similar, where this was thoroughly explored.
Books like Eric Nylund's Halo: The Fall of Reach, Greg Bear's Forerunner Saga (Halo again), or Brandon Sanderson's Infinity Blade: Awakening are all pretty well-respected and did well in terms of sales. Probably because they manage to avoid falling into the temptation to simply recreate the game experience as a book. They use the game's plot as a starting point to influence the story without dictating it.
Of course, by deviating away from "the game" as fans experienced it, you risk alienating them because the final product doesn't match up with what they expect. And because the same fans are probably the reason why the studio is willing to finance the movie in the first place, I can sort of understand why Hollywood repeatedly tries to hew closely to the source game even though that approach has repeatedly screwed them.
The peculiar thing is that they face a somewhat similar situation when they turn a book into a movie. And yet, Hollywood is more than willing to take risks and deviate away from the source material when necessary. So what about video games in particular scares the studios away from doing the same?
Some games can even continue story telling for hundreds of hours, meandering through dozens of different storylines, arcs, characters, minute details, (Skyrim, Fallout,..). Some games even have their own books inside the games that the character player can read!
The medium really is quite a bit more flexible than a movie. Where I think some comments are suggesting that games are not story rich enough to translate into movies and that's certainly true in some cases, I would argue that the types of story telling are simply not always directly compatible with a linear movie story line.
Movies afraid to deviate away from source material I don't think applies to the problem. I've probably seen most video game movies (even the cringe-worthy Uwe Boll ones) and I'd say the overwhelming problem is no one on set even bothering to look at the source material, or understanding what they're trying to do.
Someone mentioned Edge of Tomorrow, which never was a game. It was based on a very light-sci-fi japanese novel, in turn inspired by a player's forum account of restarting a game over and over in order to incrementally learn enough to finish it.
But it doesn't really matter whether Edge of Tomorrow was or was not based on a video game. The fact that it works as a movie and you can think about it in terms of a video game proves that there's no issue with making a video game movie.
The problem with Hollywood sometimes or often putting out crap is a Hollywood problem, not a medium or genre problem.
Think of a movie you thought had all potential to be good, but turned out bad, and then google the backstory on its production. I'll put $10 on saying that it most likely suffered from "too many chefs"/creation by committee, and focus-grouping it to death, instead of trusting the vision of the creator(s), whether that be screenwriter, director or other.
This is obviously subjective, but why is the best Marvel movies Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Deadpool and Logan?
For example, James Mangold did both The Wolverine and Logan, what changed between them?
In a video game situation most of these people need to look at the game and build a world that looks like it’s ripped from the game, or the fans get cranky. But once the director does this, isn’t he/she tainted by the source material?
I think movies would do better converted to games like Golden Eye. I would love to check out Gone in 60 Seconds as a game, similar to GTA.
I absolutely loved the concept of the "Jimmy" character, it made the entire movie super satisfying. The topic of surrogate bodies, whether virtual, robotic, or in this case biologic, is very interesting to me.
"Edge of Tomorrow" is a fantastic video game movie in spirit. The Groundhog-Day-Formula is not new, but it nails the game experience of having a "savepoint" and getting better and better until you master the bullet hell level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs
I know it was a commercial disaster, but Final Fantasy is the closest we've come IMO. The series has a great aesthetic and style that doesn't feel too derivative of anything else, and it's known for having great plots and characters (by video game standards). If anything, they strayed too far from the source. Make it about a group of adventurers in a weird cyberpunk/fantasy universe with outrageous haircuts fighting an insane demigod and I think it can work. Obviously that works in the games.
What you have to do is take games that have strong styles already and adapt the feeling and personality, not the mechanics.