Sunday Morning Market Survey

The phone rang at 9am Sunday, interrupting my sleep-in. "Hello," a low male British voice said, "I'm calling from Future Publishing in the UK - do you have time to answer a few questions?"

It was a cross-Atlantic game marketing survey. "I'm going to list a number of movies and books. Tell me if you've seen them, read them, heard of them." Then he had me assign a number value - 10 would make a "brilliant game" and 1 was not worth mention.

Goodfellas? Godfather? Donnie Brasco? Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? A Bronx Tale? Gangs of New York? The Untouchables? The Magnificent Seven? Guns of Navarone? The Great Escape? Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction? Kill Bill? La Femme Nikita? The Professional? The Good the Bad and the Ugly? Apocalypse Now? The French Connection? Thunderbirds?

The criteria seemed to be a) well-regarded b) has guns.

I gave La Femme Nikita a 9. "Why?" Because she kicks ass. Because she's complicated. Because it deals with themes of betrayal and complex motivations. The French one! I noted. As I spoke, I realized I was talking about a combination of Max Payne and Tomb Raider. It all seems so formula.

I gave Apocalypse Now a 10. "Why?" Because the movie is a beautiful mess. Because it's not much about shooting people on a river in Vietnam (there's Accolade's Gunboat for that [Gunboat: MobyGames|UnderDogs]). It's a descent into madness, an inquiry into civility. The film is based on Joseph Conrad, it's rich with questions of control and othering. So how would you ever translate all that into a game? These are questions for a great game designer.

And as I said that, I pictured a river-based shooting game with occasional cut-scenes of druggie 60s madness, native rituals and dancing girls. Sigh. It's possible to make shit out of anything.

So I tried to impress my interviewer further - the quick way to make these great works attractive as games is to retain some of the original characters. The chance to play Gregory Peck in a game? How would you do that? That idea evokes nostalgia and curiosity.

But the best game made of these works might explore some of the artistic challenges taken up by the media-makers. A Pulp Fiction game could feature two guys with cool hair killing and spilling funk wit. Or it could play with sequence, non-linearity and interlocking narrative.

"Uh-huh. Yes, so -" He read me a synopsis for a game based on the best-selling book "Day of the Triffids" (I hadn't heard of it). The line I remember from the synopsis: "This is a game about guns, vehicles, gangs, and killer plants." I guffawed. Sure - why not. Plants. Theme is only the window-dressing to make me interested in the game. Is there some gameplay innovation that's going to spark my curiosity? I took the high road with my interviewer, but secretly I was imagining myself devoting yet another weekend to ridding a bombed out earth of a terrifying infestation. Yippee! Another sixteen hours of my life spent collecting weapons for a hunt in a post-apocalypic landscape. I should just give in and tell people that's one of my favorite hobbies.

He listening patiently to my comments and followed up with an insightful question: "What word would you use to describe that game? Good or bad." Are those my two choices? "Yes."

Then he asked me what books, movies or TV shows should be turned into games. What a terrific question! I hadn't given that much thought before. I thought of a million movies and books, but it was too easy to imagine the type of game they would be. I wanted to name media that would be challenging, and perhaps beautiful, different virtual worlds for rewarding exploration. My first choice was easy:

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What kind of game would that make? My interviewer hadn't heard of it - I sent him to the bookstore.

What great work would you want to see translated into a game?

Comments

[shnu]

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.

[Jamie]

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

[Jamie]

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

[misuba]

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.

[snoe]

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.

[Snowmit]

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.

[Gus]

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? :)

[Walter]

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.

[Jeffool]

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.

[Mike]

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.

[Homer]

> 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.

[Trixie]

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.

[zhiwiller]

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.

[Draigon]

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.

[ClockworkGrue]

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.

[say no to cant]

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

[tim]

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.

[say no to cant]

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

[Walter]

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

[Jose Zagal]

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)

[Mike]

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.

[randomlife]

Eraserhead would be a creepy game.

[clubberjack]

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.

[crankyuser]

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.

[daniel]

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.