The long-anticipated adaptation of zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us debuted this week on HBO Max in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. In honor of this:
What video game would you like to see adapted for film or TV? Whom would you cast in major roles, and whom would you like to see direct it or act as showrunner?
I’ll have to sit this one out, because I only play casual games like Royal Match and Words with Friends. (Though I am looking forward to diving into The Last of Us, purely for Pedro Pascal.)
Go!
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I’m going to cheat on this question, because the adaptation I most want to see already exists: Netflix’s Arcane, which is an adaptation of Riot Games’ League of Legends. I was not familiar with the game at all, and indeed still have no interest in it; but the show blew me away with its animation, plot, characters, themes, world-building, music, the whole package — in other words it worked as a story, without having to rely at all on its audience making connections to the game. The biggest name in the voice cast is Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the street brawler Vi with fierce rage and vulnerability and absolutely kills it in the role; next biggest name, I guess, is Katie Leung (of Cho Chang fame) as the sharpshooter and misfit-rich-daughter Caitlyn, who sparks off of Vi in an instantly rootable partnership/romance that has great potential for future seasons. I’m not familiar with the other cast members, but they all have distinct voices perfectly suited to their characters.
I’m kind of piping up about this because I keep seeing talk of The Last of Us as the “first actually great video game adaptation,” and I keep thinking no — that would be Arcane. I think it deserves recognition as such. (Looking forward to checking out The Last of Us, though!)
Same. That was a great show and I knew nothing about the source material.
I also fnd the comments about Last of Us being the first great video game adaptation annoying and wrong.
If you’re interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, there’s a five-episode documentary series (free on YouTube) called Arcane: Bridging the Rift. It greatly increased my appreciation for the tons of creative effort put into the show.
I actually never watch behind the scenes anything. I don’t even like bloopers. I don’t like my movie or tv(or even game) worlds messed up with reality. Pulls me out of it. Might be just a Me thing, but hey.
But yes I can imagine the effort that goes into these things. Amazing.
Like our host, I don’t play many games of the sort that would plausibly get adaptations (and I definitely don’t want to see The Wordle Movie). The last one I did play a lot was Unreal Tournament, and while you obviously could use that as the setting for a personal story, Enter the Dragon has been done before and very well.
(I might like to see a boardgame adaptation, but of an actual good game, rather than just Hasbro hawking out its legacy IPs to anyone who’ll put up enough cash.)
I work in games professionally, and I do have thoughts about this one. Video game movies are known to be inevitably terrible by some cosmic law. But I’m going to ignore that and be optimistic. My answer is Myst. I’m a big Myst fan and there have been rumblings of some adaptation or other in the works since forever, but I think it could work really well if it ever got off the ground.
The games themselves are more backstory than unfolding narrative, since you’re largely alone without a lot of characters to interact with. They mostly show how Atrus, an ostensibly heroic figure, is an appallingly bad father who screws up his children over and over again with his inattention and bad choices. (In the “good” ending to Myst, he traps his two estranged sons forever in hellish solitary confinement without the possibility of ever being heard from again, because he decides they’re both too irredeemably sociopathically evil/criminally insane to risk further human contact. And his newborn daughter, the “do-over” child, doesn’t fare much better.)
But the series of three novels, about his youth and dramatic family history, would be ripe for adaptation, especially in this era of CGI everything where a succession of fantastic worlds is easier than ever to pull off.
They center around D’ni, an ancient, hidden underground kingdom—located on the same world as ours—whose inhabitants have mastered the art of traveling to any world they can imagine by writing it down in a particular way in a book. There is a whole series of professional classes, or Guilds, devoted to this work: people who prepare the special ink, people who can actually think up the worlds and write the language, people who make sure the worlds are safe to visit and no one gets stranded there, and so on. There is internal debate over whether this is an act of hubristic creation or humble discovery, just finding a way to reach something that already exists somewhere in an impossibly vast universe. (The Miller brothers, who created Myst, are famously people of deep faith, and though there’s no overt religion in the work, a Creator and the act of creating are recurrent themes.)
The books deal with the politics and intrigue leading to the fall of the D’ni empire and its aftermath and the family drama of Atrus’s parents and grandparents, one D’ni and one surface dweller, as D’ni began to explore and be exposed to the outside world. The D’ni civilization explored in the novels is a rich setting with a lot of interesting worldbuilding and history, not to mention all the possibilities of travel to “any world you can imagine.” It’s begging to be brought to life on screen.
That actually sounds really amazing.
That could definitely work. A direct adaptation of The Book of Atrus would be perfect.
I loved Myst (though I never finished it!). I loved how atmospheric it was, and how different it was from other video games at the time (and since, too, I guess). I think it would be an immense challenge to adapt it for the screen, but it could pay off handsomely. Artistically, at least.
It’s a tricky question, because there are basically only two kinds of video game plots: The ones that take advantage of the unique characteristics of games as a medium and so wouldn’t work on film (Bioshock) or the ones that are basically already movies with intermittent gameplay and so adapting them would be redundant (Last of Us).
This War of Mine might work as a movie. It’s a story about a small group of people trying to survive in the middle of a war zone, going out at night only when they’re in desperate need of supplies and being very reluctant to use violence.
I suspect that, like (non-computer) role-playing games, a lot of video game plots are fun in part because you have influence over them, whether that’s designed-in decision points or simply the approach you take while progressing through the world. It’s a standard that writeups of RPG sessions in linear media like books or films tend to be boring, not to mention clichéd, and this may be why there haven’t been much in the way of successful translations from interactive to linear media.
True, and that’s why I think the most successful adaptation of a game would take the game’s setting, tone, and themes, and maybe characters, but not plot or central conflict (since that’s for the player to resolve).
Maybe I’ll be selfish and propose one more—I worked on a multiplayer steampunk airship combat game called Guns of Icarus that I think would make a great setting for a fun and stylish action movie. It would be a Firefly-esque adventure story about a scrappy merchant airship crew just trying to get by from job to job hauling cargo, taking passengers, and the odd bit of smuggling and scavenging, fighting off pirates, and trying (and failing) not to get drawn into a massive airship war among squabbling factions. There’d be visits to far-flung little towns and settlements and battle action sequences ranging from agile dogfights to massive faceoffs between aerial fleets to submarine-like hide and seek hunts among the clouds. With wacky, over the top guns, costumes, and ship designs, of course.
I’d say God of War, but the latest 2 games have been so damn amazing and perfect that translating them to tv or moivies feels like it would ruin them. I think they are giving it a go, though. This worries me.
Similar comment about the Mass Effect games. super awesome sci-fi world that feels like its been done to death already in tv and movies. I love gaming in that world though.
I wonder about audience segmentation. Traditionally this sort of thing goes for the audience that doesn’t know the games – so there’s a lot of slow careful introduction of the world, maybe you redo the plot of one of them, and so on. But with something like Mass Effect I suspect a majority of people who might see it have already played the games – so would it make more sense to tell a completely new story?
oh yeah. I’d hate them to just start from ME1 and go from there. Would much rather have a fresh story in that world.
People would whine and complain either way, we know. haha