A very 'special' relationship

Gaming and Film have been in bed together since Super Mario Bros. in 1993, and every single thing they have produced, without exemption, has been shit.

Feature by Craig Wilson | 08 Sep 2007
The film industry owes gamers. We lap up every single mediocre game released in conjunction with big films, most of which have been so quickly conceived you'd be forgiven for thinking it was put together on someone's lunch break. Moreover, games designers will occasionally produce classic games based on movies, take Goldeneye, Blade Runner or Tie Fighter. So where on earth is the movie that gamers deserve? One that conveys the excitement, interactivity and passion of playing a great game. Apparently it is lying beat up and crying under the shadow of greedy studio execs and directorial morons.

Morons like Uwe Boll, a German director who seems to specialise in bringing poor games to screen (see – or better don't – Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne and House of the Dead, all three of which are in imdb's bottom 100), producing an abomination of epic proportions which harms both industries. The man is worse for films/games than George W. was for America's reputation abroad. The closest we have come to having a competent filmmaker approach a game was Peter Jackson with Halo. Yet this has been canned and Jackson himself wasn't even planning to direct. This does however highlight another problem, how can Halo's ten missions of constant shooting be successfully translated into a competent movie? It doesn't have a particularly deep story to help produce an interesting script. Yet in conjunction with the upcoming advent of Halo 3's release, it could at least have earned some mainstream credibility for the genre.

The major flaw in most game to screen adaptations is that most have been based on games with little or no plot. Look at the list: Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, Tomb Raider and Doom. Great games, but not one of them has a particularly engaging plot. Thus we end up with films featuring completely original, and undoubtedly god awful, plots which neither satisfy fans by being respectful to the game, nor your average cinema goer by being, you know, good. Whenever filmmakers do pick up a game with a half decent plot, say Resident Evil, they scrap its story and come up with their own which ends up being inferior anyways. Instead of picking games with great storylines, studios have instead chosen classic games regardless of whether they have the plot to take a film's weight. Gaming and film have been in bed together since Super Mario Bros. in 1993, and every single thing they have produced, without exemption, has been shit.

So where does the future lie for collaboration between the industries? The gaming industry is great for films, look at Alien vs. Predator, a great game and a perfect homage to its source material. Look at Alien vs. Predator the film, a pathetic cash-in. To make matters worse, upcoming releases don't look promising. Hitman's trailer looked so unprofessional I'm surprised it's not a straight to DVD feature. The trailer for Dungeon Siege, by Uwe Boll again, is as plain laughable as it is depressing. So why even bother making game adaptations? Indeed there's rarely anything more boring than watching someone else play a game, but that's exactly what these films are suggesting, and the cast and crew are often poor players. The main answer is of course to make money - your money. So why accept this at all? The reason is simple; there are loads of games out there with plots and characters far better realised than in many movies. Consider Metal Gear Solid or Knights of the Old Republic. Yet until priorities change, or a skilled filmmaker takes the reins of a good game adaptation then it seems that change is very far away indeed. Did you know there's a Sims film in production? Enough said.