January 18, 2006

More games from movies

PCGamer.jpgThe uber games publisher Ubisoft has been shouting about how it wants to create more games from movies. Wooo. Great news. Does that mean more games built using the same engine with different movie voices and characters as per Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia?

You see movie fans are quick to deride the output from the adaptation of videogame to movie, but you should see the mess that comes out of the adaptation the other way. Sure there are some good ones, and I believe that King Kong is not too bad, but it's still just taking the backbone of another game and dropping on the movie characters for a fast buck. It's as bad as the movie adaptations of videogames like Doom.

Here's Ubisoft though shouting about how they want to do more of them, and the killer reasons are in the quotes from the CEO, from Eurogamer:

"We want to get 25% of our turnover coming from movie licensed games. We have a few things on the way that can help us to continue to do business in this segment of the market,"...

..."We're really happy with our experience with King Kong. It helps when you're creating a game to have the huge marketing power of the film behind it. It gives a lot more power to the game we create,"

Oi, where's gameplay mentioned? Capturing the feel of the movie, some of the plot, engaging the player and the audience? Ah, none of that. It's marketing.

There we have the problem between videogames and movies, either way it goes it's about using the marketing and the existing fan base of the original medium to make money. This can be said of many adaptations between media, but I think this is the most obvious and the one that is consistently done without shame.


Posted by at January 18, 2006 03:40 AM


Comments

I can't help but agree with you on this, movie tie in games are largely about marketing. That said the production processes of both media play a part.

Bearing in mind that a decent videogame can take as long if not longer to make than a movie and cost fair chunk too, it's hardly suprising how many generic movie games we see.

In order to get a simultaneous release the game almost has to start production before the movie so unless (like King Kong) the Director takes a direct interest in the games production anything more than a visual resemblance is unlikely.

For those of you who can remember the Nintendo 64 (not many judging by the stony silence that greets most posts relating to games on here) then you might recall the Daddy of movie tie in games and one of the best first person shooters to ever grace a console and the no quibble all time best Bond game - Goldeneye.

Posted by: Randall P at January 19, 2006 04:48 AM