Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth

I don't know how to do it but a game about social detachment, loneliness and despair could be very interesting.

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas would be a challenge to transition to a game...but I'd love to see someone try.

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas would be a challenge to transition to a game...but I'd love to see someone try.

On one level, the question is silly. Games are not stories; games are frameworks in which people take actions. Hence, the only context in which this question can possibly make sense is one in which "great work" is replaced with "great action story," and "game" is replaced with "action game" - that is, a context so incredibly limited that truly interesting results are almost impossible.

If you open up the context so that the resulting game is interesting, and gives you enough choices to reshape the story - then, well, the game doesn't have anything to do with the story anymore, does it? You're just left with the title and some thematic elements, and they're essentially just marketing.

But then again, even my responses here are as freighted with assumptions as your friend from Future Publishing. A game based on One Hundred Years of Solitude might be great and might be a disgusting aberration; it depends on the decisions made by the game's designer. In fact, I'd say that you have so much more latitude in adapting a book or movie into a game (compared to, say, adapting a book into a movie), given the huge difference in how the media work, that any predictions (or surveys) about the latter based on the former are just not even worth discussing.

Which I suppose brings me back to where I started. Maybe if I go all the way around again, it'll make sense this time. I'm gonna go have some decaf.

How about Amelie? If you think about it, the whole movie was a series of mini games where she either directly affected other's every day lives or tried to discover who was changing hers.

Amelie would make an amazing game if it was entirely based around meddling and then watching the consequences play out. Fight Club would make an interesting game for the same reason (mind you I'm talking about a version of Fight Club that has nothing whatsoever to do with the clearly going to be awful fighting game that they're making.

I would like to play games set in the universes of just about any Miyazaki movie, especially Laupta: Castle in the Clouds.

Day of the Triffids would be an interesting game. In the novel, almost everyone in the country, besides the protagonist, is blinded. The theme for 28 Days Later borrowed heavily from the beginning of the novel where the hero wakes up in hospital to find the world around him empty. I'm not sure that that feeling of loneliness would translate well to a video game. Metroid has already done lonely wandering so brilliantly...

I think another of John Wyndham's novels; The Chrysalids, could be good though. Handling telepathy would be a fun challenge, and could make a good multiplayer aesthetic. It's another burnt out post-apocalyptic world though, unfortunately.

Maybe a Beat Takeshi movie could be a game. Hana-bi anyone? :)

Hm, I have to admit, I'm not quite seeing how the stuff that makes 100 Years of Solitude great would transfer over to a game. On the other hand, I've had it in mind ever since I read The Trial that Kafka would work incredibly well for a graphic adventure, as his work is inherently about the bureaucratic runaround, and most graphic adventures are about giving you *some* kind of runaround.

Implementing the universe of Cowboy Bebop would be fantastic in a Privateer/Freelancer-style game.

I'm going with Night of the Living Dead. Or at least a game designed like a George Romero zombie flick. More likely Dawn of the Dead would work.
(Anyone know if there's any plans for a tie-in to the movie coming out?)

I want a small house that I can start in, and eventually forage my way to a shopping mall, school, or prison. The main point of the game is just to survive. You'll have to go out and secure food, gather other survivors if you choose, etc. But I want a sea of zombies outside my doors at all times, and occassional break-ins by them at random times, even if there's story elements being resolved in the game. And if they eat someone important to the plot, ah well, so much for that storyline.

I believe someone on Gamespotting once mentioned "Battle Royale" as a good movie to be translated into a game.

If anyone's read the original novel, I believe that the book makes an even better game. The story of the book is that with the way students are behaving these days, a futuristic Japan has decided that groups of students must hunt each other down and kill one another within the space of three days of themselves die.

Now, as far as a game would be concerned, each player gets random weapons. There are no powerups on the island (besides maybe a hospital with healing equipment), only what each student has. So, kill a student or steal their bag, and you have their equipment.

I can imagine it as a great online game. Very dramatic and very open. I also imagine there would be interesting ways for players to work together or in teams.

I think it translates to game very well.

> I would like to play games set in the universes of just about any Miyazaki movie

The funny thing is there are plenty of games that claim to take their inspiration from Miyazaki movies. Jak & Daxter for instance with it's funny airships are supposedly inspired from Nausicaa. Knowing they claim Miyazaki inspiration the ears of the characters seem lifted from the little animal/pet from Nausicaa as well.

The last great novel I read was Nabokov's Lolita. I considered it for about half a second before realizing it would be a very very bad idea for a game.

So I'll go with either The Sheltering Sky or The Magus. The former is a trio of tourists' nightmare in the African desert, where Prince of Persia meets Oregon Trail, the latter an fairy tale mind game on a Greek island. I've really been digging on choose your own adventure ideas lately, and The Magus has the story to back up that kind of gameplay.

Ever since I read them, I've been tryin to figure out how to adequately convert the best-book-ever House of Leaves into a game.

Also, the setting of Satan Burger would probably make an easy and interesting GTA-style universe.

Amelie would make a great game (City of Lost Children as well).

Well, I would say Fight Club for its dementia and great character dialogue, but apparently that's already on its way to being misinterpreted. So my runner up for this moment would have to be Requiem for a Dream because I can't see that as being an easy formula game. That one would take some thinking and could be really good.

Tricky issue.

On the one hand, it's hard to take a great work from one medium and adapt it to another medium while maintaining the greatness, e.g. almost every game based on a movie license. See the film Adaptation for more information, and a good chuckle.

On the other hand, back in the 80s there was a series of games for the Commodore 64 called Wyndham Classics. These were games based on (for the most part) classic children's novels. They were all adventure games of one sort or another. I played Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, Alice In Wonderland, and what was probably the best came in the series, Below the Root. These games also inspired me to actually go read these stories, and other children's classics (Peter Pan,Chronicles of Narnia, Black Cauldron triology, Wizard of Oz, etc.), and they were damn good games for their time.

You might want to make friends with a C64 emulator, and go try these games out.

Notice a trend with these adapted works? They're all adventure stories. One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably not best suited for game adaptation, although I also didn't like that book, so I could be biased. It is important to consider the sorts of emotions that games can convey easily. Unfortunately, we're still in the process of determining what those are. Based on personal experience, I'll hazard to say that games (by which I mean gameplay, not cinematics) are well suited to make a player feel Pride, Fear, Suspense, Frustration, and Guilt, for starters. To seriously put up a great work from some other medium for game adaptation, it would be best to begin with one that makes heavy use of one of these.

I will also agree with Mike about Battle Royale the novel. Interestingly, we'd be making a game about a novel about a game. I'd like to see Battle Royale as a survival horror (although I probably couldn't stand to play it, because I am a big wuss about these things). It would be interesting to see a survival horror that had no supernatual elements. Now I have terrible images in my mind. I'll have to go think happy thoughts before I go to bed.

I don't think "othering" is a word.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, if made into a game produced by Hideo Kojima, would probably turn out pretty damned nice. If Murakami did have such issues with seeing his books adapted into other formats.

I don't think "othering" is a word.

Othering is a concept from postcolonialism. Give the two terms a Google.

Cool! I also got that phone call... What I thought was really weird is that they asked a bunch of questions about movies that have already been made into games!
(The Italian Job and The Great Escape)

I was thinking about it for a while, and I came up with some other books that I think would make good games. One of the things I found was tht a book doesn't necessarily have to be "great" to be a game, but rather have a story and concept that would make an entertaining game. So, here's my personal list of books that I'd like to see as gamees.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Stand by Stephen King
The Dark Tower books by Stephen King
Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald
A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

I'd also be pleased as punch to see the movie "Memento" made into an adventure game.

Eraserhead would be a creepy game.

Since the real defining strength of games is interactivity, it doesn't make sense to choose linear stories from other media so much as worlds from other media. This is why Middle Earth is the holy grail of MMORPG worlds. Yeah, it would be fun to play one of the members of the fellowship, but it would be just as much fun (or even more fun) to play a new character through your own story in the world of Middle Earth. Middle Earth is so lovingly detailed, and there are so many compelling places to explore and experience. Star Trek and Star Wars are similar cases, though there is still an attachment to the specific characters of those stories. The worlds are fleshed out enough to warrent exploration on their own.

I'd say that you have so much more latitude in adapting a book or movie into a game (compared to, say, adapting a book into a movie), given the huge difference in how the media work

What fun is a game if you're just working your way to the same conclusion as the movie, with random puzzles and enemy encounters? Enter the Matrix was a rare example of being clever with this, since the player wasn't rehashing the movie but rather playing the backstory with secondary characters.

Book-to-movie translations seem to work with Phillip K. Dick's works (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc), but those films are just starting to leverage his name in a roundabout way ("From the author of Blade Runner"). Has there ever been a good game made from one of his works, though?

It's pretty difficult to take something so linear and make a good interactive experience from it. Unfortunately for us, most tie-in games are targeted at casual gamers looking to experience the movie or book in a different way. This is fine for business but doesn't really do much to push game innovation.

I've thought for a long time that Day of the Triffids would make an interesting MMORPG; world with few, lonely survivors, persistent horrible threat. Then, after helping a company plan such a thing, I realised that post-apocalyptic scenarios were depressing and unattractive.

Regardless of this, I'll suggest Cthulhu. Mmm, tentacles.

crankyuser, Westwood made a Blade Runner game a few years back, it wasn't that well-known but I found it fun.

It wasn't really your typical film/book game, you played a character completely absent from both, and no attempt was made to make him a big part of the story that we just never happened to see. Your story was mostly completly seperate to his, with just a few characters and locations in common. The world, visuals, story, and themes were all undeniably Blade Runner, but telling an original tale (I thought it borrowed from the book once or twice, but still) kept it fresh.

Your character followed a similar path to Deckard, emotionally speaking, except you were free to choose your attitude and actions for much of the game, playing out all the different scenarios gave you not only a good understanding of why he did what he did, but also how he'd feel if he had done things differently. For example, the ending where you're a 'super' blade runner and retire all the replicants is the most emotionally-hollow, you actually feel ashamed taking it.

That's makes a good film/book to game conversion in my book, it complements the original work without changing it, and also adds to it in ways.

i agree with clubberjack's comment about sometimes the best way to convert a book or movie to a game is to borrow only the setting and the world, and use different characters and story arc. with that in mind, i think Miyazaki's Nausicaa would make for an absolutely AMAZING game world, especially if Miyazaki would do art direction for it.

i've been thinking lately that The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, is prime for a game: it's setting is wonderfully interesting, and the story is a sequence of puzzles/mysteries, with a good part of it set in the labryinth of the library. what more do you need for a compelling adventure game?

Ender's Game seems like another great candidate for a game. it should be obvious why, if you've read it. if you haven't read it: for shame!

i know there are some great game ideas among Neil Gaiman's short stories, but none are coming to mind right now. the Sandman series might work.

the biggest problem that i see with converting books and movies into a game is that you probably will read the book or see the movie before playing the game, so you already know how it's going to end. Enter the Matrix definently had the right idea, in my opinion.

-Titus

The Windup Bird Chronicle , by Haruki Murakami. I think this might be possible Shenmue-style, with subtle but forceful hints directing the player down the linear story path. There is so much content that it would be fairly easy to embellish tangents with particularly good game play potential (you could play as the protagonist in the various war stories, etc). Like Shenmue (esp. Shenmue 2), small mini-games could be used to convey some of the action sequences in the novel (such as the point in the story where he tails the guitarist).

Also, Akira really should be made into something cooler than the one NES game that got produced. I see this as a super-easy translation into a cool game: there are shooting segments, driving segments, running segments, flying segments, and even sneaking segments. The player could choose to play as Kaneda (mostly driving and shooting), Tetsuo (flying and psychotic attacks), or Kay (sneaking, hiding, driving). The most important plot points in the movie take place in scenes that are mostly dialog, which makes them good candidates for in-game cutscenes.

waka

I would choose Jacob's Ladder. I think games should be a vehicle for interactive art as such, games are getting deeper storylines but the execution lacks any risk or contemporary vision. Jacob could battle his demons as he spirals downward into the constant struggle agaisnt his greatest enemy. Will he find find out the truth or will he forever be trapped?
These premises challenge more than the immortal 'life' of game characters usually portrayed, he's just a man. I'd like the play the story of the game, not the game as a story.

'Ico' allways reminds me of Borges' stories, you never really get all the answers, just a sense of scale and history; though I'm not sure whether these works were a reference point for the designers.

Paul Auster's 'In The Country Of Last Things' could produce an interesting gun free take on the generic society-in-post-apocalyptic-chaos theme.

The collected works of Shakespeare (ok, maybe Henry V). Now before you call me a smartass, go play Dynasty Warriors.

I'd like to see Stephen King's Gunslinger series made into a nice RPG/Action game.

And of course, Kill Bill is just SCREAMING to be made into a game.

Kill Bill might work well if you could avoid ending up with a mediocre brawler that is too reliant on cut scenes. You know, like what happened with enter the matrix

Let me just put on my bastard hat-- it’s always pretty close to hand in any case-- and just ask: “Why”?

I enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude greatly, and am glad that it has so far not been turned into a movie-- let alone a (shudder) game. Perhaps it shows a deficit of vision on my part, but I can’t see how this book which I consider one of the most successful uses of the medium of writing (I don’t mean commercially, I mean artistically) could be made into a film that didn’t suck. My point is that it is the use of the medium that makes this work great-- remove the medium and it falls apart.

Why do remakes at all? If something is successful in one medium leave it alone. It is good and proper to be inspired by a work-- to let the choices its creator made with his medium influence the choices you make in your own.

All that being said, I do very earnestly wish that more game developers were better read, saw more films (besides the blockbusters), knew more about painting, sculpture, and music. Currently there is a closed system where game developers play games, watch action movies and read (if they read) science fiction and fantasy novels. One type of idea is thus represented again and again.

Othering is a concept from postcolonialism. Give the two terms a Google.

Ah, nothing livens up a discussion like critical-theory jargon. Not that I mean to marginalize anyone's discourse...

As for game ideas: How about the Iliad and/or Odyssey? You've got war, political intrigue, travel, monsters, colorful heroes, etc.

Also, it's public domain.

re: the first comment - the game has already been made. It was called Postal. Not too interesting.

re: what book should be made into a game: going by the attempt to challenge media mentioned above, House of Leaves. American McGee's Alice meets Zork. Though how you could do this as anything other than a (severely twisted) text adventure I'm not sure.

House of Leaves seems like a solid candidate for survival horror if you kept the focus on the exploration of the house.Of course, so much of that book is about character relationships, puns, intentional typos, typography... you'd lose a lot in the adaptation. What, for example, is the best way to handle the footnotes? Should Johnny Truant's character even appear? How do you convey the complete and total lack of a minotaur when you can't just use strikethrough?

If you wanted to get real crazy, you'd make House of Leaves: the Game a collection of mini-games that would delete and install themselves in random locations on your hard drive as you played them... or something.

Actually, the closest thing I've played to the sort of "playing with the medium" that House of Leaves goes for is Metal Gear Solid 2, and many gamers had issues with that one (not me though, I wish it had gone farther).

I think the thing that appeals to me about the idea of taking some of these books that don't map well to existing genres is that they MIGHT spark something incredible.

I can do without a Fight Club fighting game, for example, or a One Hundred Years of Solitude Kart Racing. But a game where a player manages the higher level anarchy-inducing aspects of Fight Club, complete with trying to acquire new recruits and staying below the radar of normal society, all replete with the same sense of style and music from the movie, keeping the whole thing kind of sandbox and open-ended? I'm not saying that that would neccessarily be a good game, but I do think that, given the right people and the right level of inspiration, you could probably build something interactive and amazing and brilliant out of that. It's all about knowing which parts are vital, about capturing what was essential in the original.

I want new kinds of games. I want to do things I haven't already done a hundred thousand times before.

Three cheers for Hard Boiled Wonderland. Two worlds, one conscious, one subconscious, whose plots spiral into each other. Half is a Deus Ex-esque detective story, the other is a Myst-y exploration puzzle. And it's the discovery of how they are interlinked that marks the climax. Yum.

An interesting adaptation could be the first issue of Paul Hornschemeier's Forlorn Funnies, which dealt with people's relationship with television through the structure of channel flipping (characters overlap in the stories). A game could be a sort of Wario Ware with narrative and a tad longer attention span, bouncing through short short stories with distinct (occasionally recurring) characters and diverse styles. It'd be wild and best of all... 2D.

A tactics RPG based on the original Shannara cycle is long overdue.

What about Ellroy? L.A. Confedintial, The Black Dalhia, hell even The Cold Six Thousand (has there been a game about the JFK assassination?). It'd be really cool to see a True Crime-style game set in 50s L.A. with the depth and nuance of character he brings to fairly standard cop fare. Plus, this might actually sell in today's shooter-heavy environment.

On a totally different planet, how about a game version of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy?

Your character followed a similar path to Deckard, emotionally speaking, except you were free to choose your attitude and actions for much of the game, playing out all the different scenarios gave you not only a good understanding of why he did what he did, but also how he'd feel if he had done things differently

Fting!, sounds like what they did for the Resident Evil movie, where they used new characters so you wouldn't already know the outcome. Getting viewers to care about the characters was a different challenge, however! Watching someone else make dumb mistakes wasn't as compelling as struggling with the controls yourself.

...avoid ending up with a mediocre brawler that is too reliant on cut scenes. You know, like what happened with enter the matrix

Shnu, agreed. But most people saw Enter the Matrix as just a vehicle for cutscenes anyway.

I would both hate and love to see someone try to catpure "Jacob's Ladder" in a game.

Love it, because it's one of my favorite movies dealing with the nature of perception. This could make it a very deep roleplaying adventure, slowly trying to figure out what's real and what is not. Some games have been done in this vein before, however most were puzzle-solvers (i.e. chess game within a mystery game), or preludes to shooters (XIII).

Hate it, because they'd screw it up. Some action-oriented company would get the license, and make the game about combat in Viet Nam.

D

The Dark Crystal would be a supercool setting for a game... dunno what it'd be about but the characters in the movie would translate well into a dark semi-cartoony game atmosphere.

Sierra On-Line released a Dark Crystal game in 1982.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Sierra_On-Line,_Inc.html

It could definitely stand to be revisited, though.

Well, I have to agree with a few people here. Amelie would make a great little game. Beowulf would be a fantastic RPG if done right. The oddyssey is just crying for a game, but we will probably get it made after the Illiad is made: It is going to be a brad pitt movie coming out later this year, (it is called troy, but it's the Illiad).

I would think some court intrigue would be great in a game, I would love to play an intelligence operative working for the greatest spymaster: Wallcingham who worked for Queen Elizabeth, sort of play it like theif meets a loose plot narrative style like GTA uses. That btw would be an adaptation of the Movie "Elizabeth"

Also, who else would like to see some shakespeare adaptations? I am personnally looking forward to playing the prince of Denmark in "Hamlet: the game" out maneuver your treacherous uncle and kill your decietful school mates: rosencrans and guildenstern; fight a duel with Laertes, what else could you ask for?

Oh, and on a final note, if no one has made "The princess Bride" into a game, there is something missing.

Well, I have to agree with a few people here. Amelie would make a great little game. Beowulf would be a fantastic RPG if done right. The oddyssey is just crying for a game, but we will probably get it made after the Illiad is made: It is going to be a brad pitt movie coming out later this year, (it is called troy, but it's the Illiad).

I would think some court intrigue would be great in a game, I would love to play an intelligence operative working for the greatest spymaster: Wallcingham who worked for Queen Elizabeth, sort of play it like theif meets a loose plot narrative style like GTA uses. That btw would be an adaptation of the Movie "Elizabeth"

Also, who else would like to see some shakespeare adaptations? I am personnally looking forward to playing the prince of Denmark in "Hamlet: the game" out maneuver your treacherous uncle and kill your decietful school mates: rosencrans and guildenstern; fight a duel with Laertes, what else could you ask for?

Oh, and on a final note, if no one has made "The princess Bride" into a game, there is something missing.

Well I think that I would drop dead and crack up if I ever saw One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned into a game...

...just picture it as RTS...

T.

City of the lost children was already a game, made by Infogrames, now Atari.

The name of the Rose was also a game in 1987, called La Abadia del Crimen. It belongs to the 8-bit home computer era. For Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX and C64, I think. It's kind of what we could call today graphic adventure game. Programers tried to be a licensed product, but Umberto Eco never replyed, so they simply took a different name to avoid legal matters.

Now there's an amateur remake on the works. See URL: abadiadelcrimen.com
Both the original and the remake are in Spanish only.

City of the lost children was already a game, made by Infogrames, now Atari.

The name of the Rose was also a game in 1987, called La Abadia del Crimen. It belongs to the 8-bit home computer era. For Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX and C64, I think. It's kind of what we could call today graphic adventure game. Programers tried to be a licensed product, but Umberto Eco never replyed, so they simply took a different name to avoid legal matters.

Now there's an amateur remake on the works. See URL: abadiadelcrimen.com
Both the original and the remake are in Spanish only.

City of the lost children was already a game, made by Infogrames, now Atari.

The name of the Rose was also a game in 1987, called La Abadia del Crimen. It belongs to the 8-bit home computer era. For Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX and C64, I think. It's kind of what we could call today graphic adventure game. Programers tried to be a licensed product, but Umberto Eco never replyed, so they simply took a different name to avoid legal matters.

Now there's an amateur remake on the works. See URL: abadiadelcrimen.com
Both the original and the remake are in Spanish only.

I don't think it's possibly to translate a book or movie into a game. Not directly, anyway (or else you get crap like Enter the Matrix...or better yet, E.T.).

What you can do (fairly easily) is to make a game inspired by something you read, saw or listened to. The truck is to take one thing from the source that reasonated with you and make that the focus of the game. For example Kill Bill is going to be a left-right-left-right-B-A fighting game like Tekken or Soul Caliber. But then you're just remaking Tekken with Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman models and skins. What's important in that move is the style -- the cinematography, the acting, the dialog, the music and the special FX all contributing toward a definite style. Storytelling through Style. The actual "game" doesn't have to be particularly innovative as long as its done with style (look at Popcap.com for examples of fairly staid game concepts done in a new way).

(Amelie is a superhero movie, btw)

- J

I'd say a great videogame would be made from The Ultimate Rush by Joe Quirk... rollerblading (in San Francisco!), Chinese Mafia, corrupt cops, what else do you need? Also, Bruce Bethke's Head Crash... much action and humor, always a good combination. Imagine a cross between the Matrix and Douglas Adams' Beaurocracy.

That, or Love in the Time of Cholera...

Doesn't all this talk of games adaptations make you realise how limited the videogame form still is?

In each case, be it Marquez, Matrix, Eco, Kill Bill or Amelie, you are taking an expansive, emotionally compelling narrative and trying to fit it into a highly reductive game-structure which can only trade on the fond memories you have of the original.

Even to say "its going to be a GTA3 style sandbox thing" sounds like a cop out. That 'sandbox' form is not the non-linear miracle its been made out to be...

That's not to say that adaptations can't be done well in making playable certain aspects of a source. Westwood's 'point and click' Blade Runner, was initially quite marvellous, although it did get pretty tedious after a while.

Just as films can transform their source material into something that stands alone, maybe there is potential for games to do the same. It just hasn't happened, yet.

Most adaptations are obviously about money and licensing, so I was curious to see that there is a Tarkovsky/Strugatsky Brothers inspired FPS coming our way called Stalker.

www.stalker-game.com

And I for one, would like to see a game inspired by the cult 1960's TV show, The Prisoner.

Ultimately that becomes the easiest way games today can have one small portion of the emotional impact of a movie or other linear form - make people associate your game with it through licensing.

We haven't had the luxury (thanks to a industry that's more risk averse than Hollywood) to create many methods tailored to games that have as much impact.

But while we are limited (in terms of the form) today, I don't think we have to be - we just have to find ways of reasonably expanding that reductive structure to achieve moments of comparable affect (in degree, I mean, we're not gonna have the same type of emotional impact of a linear narrative).

Case in point: The Prisoner is an fine example of episodic storytelling that would work well for a non linear game - 17 episodes in all, the only ones you have to see in order are the last two.

Each episode in between reveals new information about the Village and the Prisoner, yet is in no way dependent on another episode (which paved way for TV's shows with ongoing storylines - X Files, Buffy, etc.). Part of the narrative punch comes from the way the user orients the pieces.

I'm not saying that the only method games have available for affecting the player emotionally is tying story in, but it is one, and we could be better at it.

And me, while there's lot's of conversions I'd like to see, I'd rather see existing ones that were crap-i-fied, redone. Why EA is going to remake the one game that could potentially stand apart from it's source, Goldeneye, is beyond me...

Why not do "Catcher In The Rye"? You could save your sister from the mysterious forces of evil, all the while exploring your own elusive identity! Put on your killing hat and rampage agaist all the phonies!! It would sell, I tell you.

I like the "Hardboiled Wonderland" idea too, or any of Murakami's books.

another vote for hard boiled wonderland, probably the best candidate of murakami's works.

the prisoner would also make an excellent game, as would swiss family robinson, and the odyssey. for me the test is how well the fictional world is suited to exploration and how much the text suggests the possible small ways of affecting that world which when combined lead to significant changes. destroying things or characters, gradually building up a character, goal-oriented interaction with characters, puzzle solving in a densely interwoven environment, etc

however the fictional world i would most like to see made into a game is without question "The Death Gate Cycle" by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman (Dragon Wing, Elven Star, Fire Sea, Serpent Mage, The Hand of Chaos, Into The Labyrinth, The Seventh Gate). I'm not sure whether it would better suited as an RPG, graphical adventure, action adventure, or some combination of the three, but the entire arc of the story just fits perfectly as a videogame. it is about the exploration of 4 interlinked worlds, for the purpose of figuring out HOW and WHY the worlds were made to interact with each other (all the mysteries of each world turn out to be linked to each other). the series has 1. elaborate explanations of two opposing systems for creating rune structures to affect change magically (something like the magic system in eternal darkness but quite a bit more complicated), 2. the possibility for some truly awe-inspiring level design that is completely linked with the gameplay and plot, and even 3. a labyrinth at the nexus of the 4 worlds. You could cut out all the main characters and dialog and the plot would still be fascinating and deep. The authors have even written music to accompany some pivotal events in the story. Unfortunately, like so many of the great ideas here it lacks the main thing that publishers look at when making games, a brand already established through lots of marketing.

oh, and btw a great many specific elements of jacob's ladder made it into silent hill 3, and the series as a whole was definitely inspired by it.

I'd like to see Beowolf and/or Enders Game (Orson Scott Card) as a vidio game.

Redemption of Althus (David and Liegh Eddings) might make a good game to, but it would depend on how you made it.

I'd love to see Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman translated into a game. If it didn't follow the story, then there would be plenty of opportunity for a RPG-style traipse through the lands he's created (or should I say excavated?).

I'd love to see Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman translated into a game. If it didn't follow the story, then there would be plenty of opportunity for a RPG-style traipse through the lands he's created (or should I say excavated?).

You'd think Cowboy Bebop would make for an amazing license -- it's stylish as hell, great characters, canon has lots of open areas to insert "lost stories", the setting's incredible... but the games that I know of based on it are really terribly lame. I'm not even asking for anything innovative, just well-made and polished.

Come to think of it, I'd love to see the "Jade Engine" used in Beyond Good & Evil applied to a Cowboy Bebop game.

I don't know if it's been said already, but the Long Kiss Goodnight would be an awesome multi-modal video game. Sniper missions, action, driving, the scene where she shoots the car while ice-skating. OH MAN, it would be awesome.

"Buhbuh buh buh. I got a gun in my pocket. Buhbuh buh buh, and a rifle in my hand."

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Posted by: outsider on April 11, 2006 08:39 AM

Don't you find it so annoying that they always say that they are going to take just a few moments but instead take like 30 minutes or more?
Online Paid Survey

Posted by: Online Paid Survey on October 27, 2006 12:14 PM