[caption id=”attachment_1604” align=”aligncenter” width=”555” caption=”The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…feel the fear.”]
We’ve become so cynical that even the most mediocre manifestation of the Hollywood marketing juggernaut—the video game adaptation of a Hollywood blockbuster—is now regarded with a shrug. Blame it on decades of desensitization to low quality and quick-buck schemes, but even the most reliable pop culture critics (I’m referring to that spicy blend of hipster, gamer, and techie) reserve their outrage for Uwe Boll instead of pointing their Doritos-stained fingers at lousy games. Why? Because they are exhausted. Too many targets tire even the most Spartan of sniping critics. Their trigger fingers are blistered and their cartridges are spent. Movies make for bad games but this doesn’t stop game adaptations, and since movies don’t show any sign of improving—Beverly Hills Chihuahua, anyone?—the snipers have packed up their rifles and trudged home. Taking potshots at Billy Mays along the way.
It wasn’t always like this, goes the nostalgic whiner, remembering the days when gaming was pure and movies stayed where they belonged. _But this recent phenomenon of the video game adaptation is not so recent, and those purists who decry the over-commercialization of just about every industry (including their sacrosanct gaming culture, born in the 1970’s from the foreheads of MIT polymaths and D&D geeks with degrees in computer science, so the mythology goes) might be shocked to learn that the video game industry has always sought to cash in on the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Beginning way back in 1975, with Atari’s unauthorized knockoff of Spielberg’s mega-hit, _Jaws. _Atari called their version _Shark Jaws, and released it under a different company name (Horror Games) to avoid bankruptcy in case Spielberg decided to sue.
One year later a small company named Exidy released the game Death Race, based on Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000.
[caption id=”attachment_1606” align=”aligncenter” width=”555” caption=”Never mind the bad game. How killer is this design?”]
The game involved navigating your “car” over as many fleeing “gremlins” as you could—these gremlins resembled human stick figures, and if you hit them, they would scream. Sort of. It sounded more like a 2-bit squeal. But the violence was realistic enough to raise the media’s ire (_60 Minutes _did an “expose” on violence in video games, though no one pointed out that Corman’s movie showed much more realistic violence than a black and white raster screen with stick figures), and soon the gaming industry had its first banned title. Which meant that video game adaptations of movies were suddenly profitable.
Profitable doesn’t translate to good, and there may be some connection between Hollywood’s realization that the blockbuster doesn’t have to be a good movie to make money and the video game world’s realization that ephemeral excitement opens wallets as much as word-of-mouth. So we saw the Indiana Jones game:
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1985’s Gremlins:
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And of course Donmark’s 1986 classic, Friday the 13th:
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Did it get any better with improvements in gaming technology? Of course not. Technology never replaces creativity, it only makes epic failures more expensive. Like Reservoir Dogs, the game:
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And Blade II:
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And on and on and on, from Charlie’s Angels _to _X-Men: The Last Stand _to whenever they decide to adapt _Paul Blart: Mall Cop._ _Will it ever stop? No. It doesn’t have to stop as long as it makes money, and it will always make money because every few years a new generation of wide-eyed innocents place their unwavering faith in the corporation’s ability to produce fun. I’m not picking on corporations because they’re a convenient target. Plenty of indie game producers miss the mark. But the creative ventures supported by corporate entities—presumably those entities in the “creative” field—are particularly frustrating because they have the financial ability to produce something impressive. Yet they don’t. They produce crap with alarming consistency. It’s almost as though they want to produce crap so our collective standards keep going lower, and eventually we don’t expect anything good.
Conspiracy theories aside, there has to be one superb movie-to-game adaptation deserving of praise and renewed interest (other than Rare’s 1997 GoldenEye 007, which is too obvious a choice). Quality needs recognition. That’s why I write about _Winger _and Steven Seagal albums. If not me, who? If not now, when?