by Haven Tso
I love video games. It was like an addiction that I never want to shed. My relationship with video games is on again off again type. This is simply because there are times in my life that I just didn’t have time for them. Getting involved in video games is like getting involved into a very high maintenance relationship. However, if you manage to keep it going and maintain a good balance, it is very rewarding.
Cross-pollination between video games and films is not a very new thing. After all both are very creative business and they are also about opportunities. It first started off with the video game industry creating movie tie-in games that bank in the popularity of the movies themselves However, after the crash landing of ET it was proved that no matter how popular a film is (come on it’s ET we’re talking about), the tie-in product still needs to have a quality of its own. The colossal failure of the ET video game nearly completely killed off this movie tie in video game business. But the video game industry had learnt the lesson and the business thrives again. One can still remember the marvellous job Ubisoft did with Peter Jackson’s King Kong. It was said that Peter Jackson, a video game enthusiast himself, approached Ubisoft to create the game after he played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Another funny thing is that, in the Return of the King video game, they even have the cast talking about gaming in an unlockable bonus material (rightly titled “Hobbits on Gaming”).
However, one of the more interesting trends is that more and more original video games are now being adapted into movies. The end results varied but it seems that all of sudden video games, once considered as a sideline business by Hollywood power players, had gain its own status in the creative business.
Of course, as with most things not all of those adaptations were successful. Seriously you can’t really make a sensible story out of Mario and Luigi, when after 25 years they are still trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser. Nor can you really build a sensible story for Street Fighter when there is, well, no story to talk about to begin with. The recent KO of the Chun Li movie is a good proof of that. Nonetheless, with more and more video games now focus on story telling, so did the movie tie in with these video games. The recent Prince of Persia movie provided a very good example of a plot driven video game adapted into a movie. The box office may not be as big as the Hollywood boxes hoped to be, but it is still a decent movie with a decent story. The current main force in this “video game come movie” business though is the Resident Evil franchise. Now in its fifth instalment, the movie franchise was adapted from the well know Resident Evil video games (aka Biohazard in some regions). The movies were populated with references from the games while striking itself out as an independent movie franchise with its own story. Although there were still a few hiccups here and there, but with a strong background story provided by a strong story driven video game series, the Resident Evil franchise seemed to have gone from strength to strength in the genre. Another series that is coming up hoping to be as successful is the Silent Hill movies. Different from Resident Evil, which is about evil enterprises and virus outbreak, Silent Hill is a psycho thriller that deals with consequences of decisions made earlier in life by different characters. Silent Hill materialises your fear and your inner insecurities, then magnifies them a hundred times bigger to haunt you. The first movie was ok in my opinion so it will be interesting to see how the second movie played out with one of the favourite protagonists in the series as the lead. Also the stake for the Silent Hill movie is a lot higher too in a way that the popularity of the video game is also dwindling in recent years after it failing to reinvent itself like Resident Evil did.
Looking into the future, on the horizon and still in talks for movie adaptations include, Alan Wake, Mass Effect, Nathan Drake, Halo etc. It seems that there is no stopping Hollywood bosses cashing in on things that have already established their popularity somewhere else. Although one thing they have to understand is that if not done correctly, they may wreck both the games and the movies. I will talk about that more next time.
Haven Tso is an actor, writer, graphic designer and blogger.
