Absolutely stunning movie trailers for The Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus exploded all over the web in the last 24 hours. A few weeks ago, it was the promo clips for Looper that got everybody buzzing. Like lots of other folks, I eagerly watched all those teasers over and over again. And I canāt stop thinking about how I really, really want to play more games based on movies.
Normally, Iām all for the primacy of original story, vision and experience in the games I play. And nothing beats playing through an entertainment that originated as an interactive idea. But, something like the Prometheus trailer hints at a vast universe of visual and thematic ideas. I know dozens of great sci-fi games have dealt with the exploration and terror of space exploration. But Prometheus is coming from Ridley Scott, the man behind Alien and Blade Runner. Isnāt it about time that we got a game spawned directly from his imagination?
Most of these movie-to-game projects start off from a great premise, a belief that games are great constructs for exploring the inside of a fictional world. Thatās absolutely true but efforts to actually do that get tripped up by not having enough time or vision to make a game world come alive the same way a movie world does. And, yes, engaging with works from the two media is very different, with movies being a more unilateral experience than games.
But, still, it feels like thereās been a shift when it comes to adapting TV or movie properties into video games. Over the last decade, you couldnāt turn a corner without seeing all sorts of tie-in games for movies like The Godfather, Jumper and The Matrix. But it feels like the flow of such releases has dwindled. Sure, Activision continues to do a brisk business with James Bond, Transformers and, um, Battleship games but theyāre only one publisher. More companies took similar risks in the past. A lot of the results were utterly forgettable, sure, but each one held the fleeting hope that the formula for adapting a big-screen spectacle into video-game form would be advanced by a little bit.
Now, though, it feels like any ambition for making a movie tie-in game that could hit the heights of, say, Starbreezeās work on The Chronicles of Riddick games. While the gameplay was fun, it wasnāt extremely innovative. Those titles captured the mood and tone of their cinematic counterparts. Hell, I even dug the Wanted game that came out a little while back. It tried to explain some of the super-abilities that the filmās assassin used through gameplay mechanics like cover chaining. The idea there was that Wesley moved so fast from one spot of cover to the next that he seemingly appeared in a new position out of nowhere. Itās that kind of symbiosis Iād like to see more of.
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As The Avengers approaches release this week, the lack of a corresponding video game adventure feels like a huge void. (Vague promises are being made, though.) Itās easy to write off the failures of recent yearsāSegaās Iron Man games, for exampleāas crass money grabs that deserved to fail. But, weāre never going to get a true evolution of how movie-to-game translations can happen if movie studios or developers donāt take the risks.
