There’s not a big history of videogames successfully making the jump to the movies over the past 30 years or so, even since Double Dragon and Super Mario Bros became the first to give it a go. For Hollywood movie executives it must have seemed like a good idea, rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of tens of millions of fans of a game instantly heading to the cinema to watch a film version of their favourite characters. But it really hasn’t gone to plan at all. The number of really good films based on videogames is a tiny, tiny list (perhaps Detective Pikachu is the best of the lot of them so far). Most of the movies are completely forgettable.
Which is a shame. Because it’s not very often said, but videogames are sometimes an awful lot of fun to actually just watched. You only have to search on YouTube for Let’s Play videos, and seeing someone explore the story of a game on your behalf can be fascinating and really quite entertaining. There’s a generation of kids growing up who have, for instance, spent more time watching other people play Minecraft than they have actually playing the game themselves!
Furthermore, e-sports are booming, and providing to be an incredible spectator sport. Games such as Overwatch, Fortnite, Rocket League and PlayerUnknown: Battlegrounds are becoming a real event to watch people duke it out over. It’s unsurprising that betting is booming around some of them too. Just look at some of the best CSGO jackpot sites here.
Why then, if games are designed to be so beautiful to play, and if stories are being crafted so carefully, is the experience not transferring to films? Is it just too difficult to expect a 20 hour game to be crammed into a two hour movie? That does ignore the fact that books have been truncating their stories successfully for the big screen for a good number of years. But still: there’s some kind of block here, and it’s puzzling to work out just what the problem is.
Maybe Netflix is the answer. The Witcher series of games are gigantic, open world titles where your character can lose hours simply wandering around the landscape. Rather than turn that into a movie, Netflix instead has made an ongoing television series around it, that’s up to two seasons. The Playstation sensation The Last Of Us is also to become a series as well. Maybe given the space and episode count to do something really special, there’s an opportunity here to tell a story properly and capture what’s made the respective games great. Maybe this is where Hollywood has been going wrong.
In the meantime, if you want to see just how wrong it went, go and check out that 1993 Super Mario Bros film. You’re pretty much guaranteed not to forget it in a hurry!