[Movie Monday] – Why Video Games Can’t Work Well As Films

Want to see a great video game get ruined? Watch its transition from your game console to the silver screen. Whether you’re talking about something recently released (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), something released in the last few years (Doom, Resident Evil, anything by Uwe Boll) or something released back in the days when arcade fighters and Nintendo consoles reigned supreme (Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat), it’s clear that Hollywood still has yet to figure out how to make a video game movie work. And even Japan, with its video game-based anime films like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Tekken and Street Fighter II: The Movie, has not been able to create films that are as compelling as the source material.

I’ve seen a lot of articles that have talked about how badly video game movies have failed, but I haven’t seen any articles on why they’ve failed. Certainly, it seems to be common knowledge that these films are generally rushed through production with poor choices made when it comes to the screenwriters and directors, but there’s an even more basic reason that games don’t work as films. Simply put, it’s all about the experience… but my, how that experience plays a role in the shaping of the story.

Let’s start with a simple example: Super Mario Bros. When this game debuted in the mid-1980s, it was a game unlike anything anyone had seen before. Here was a game where a couple of Italian plumbers bounced around a world of toadstools, pipes, and clouds, fighting turtles, flying fish and dragons, and gaining super powers from mushrooms and glowing flowers. As a narrative, it was a strange bit of whimsy that would have been out of place even in a children’s cartoon show. And yet within the context of the game, everything seemed to make sense. As the player moved from level to level, he or she constructed a story in his or her mind. Much of the mythology that was built up around Super Mario Bros. — the Princess Toadstool, the King Koopa, the irritating mushroom men who told Mario that the princess was in another castle — was based on some scanty storytelling in the instruction manual and game and a massive amount of imagination on the part of the player.

And yet Super Mario Bros. was successful — so much so that the conventions in the first game showed up in many of the sequels as even weirder elements (tanooki suits, Bower flying around in a clown car, a winged hat that could allow Mario to fly) were introduced into later installments. In the context of the cartoonish world of the Mushroom Kingdom, it made sense that Mario could jump super high, that he could throw fireballs or that he could turn into an invincible statue. What the story couldn’t explain, the gamer’s imagination could. The heavy amount of interaction between the user and the game made these elements make sense.

But look at what happened when filmmakers tried to take this concept and turn it into a live-action film. Suddenly, everything needed to be explained. Mario couldn’t make mighty leaps beyond that of a normal person; instead, he had to put on a pair of rocket-powered boots. He couldn’t fight strange goombas and giant turtles in a magical world of toadstools and pipes; instead, he had to land in a city with a fungus problem that was patrolled by strange, human-like creatures. Bowser couldn’t be a giant, bipedal, fire-breathing dragon with a castle full of leaping lava; instead, he had to be a guy with a forked tongue and a flamethrower.

Did the filmmakers make poor choices in attempting to translate the film? Probably. But these choices were borne out of the fact that the story needed to be built upon so that the audience could understand it, and the selections they made were intended to fill in the “how” and “why” of the video game.

One would think that Super Mario Bros. would be the exception rather than the rule, since many video game movies have been based off games that have had more fully-realized stories. For example, there seemed to be very little reason that a movie based on the Street Fighter series shouldn’t have an interesting story, since Street Fighter II had a compelling cast of characters with great backstories and an overarching plot involving an evil dictator. And yet, because the film needed to establish a hero for the sake of casting stars, the entire story had to be changed so that Jean Claude van Damme could be shoehorned into the world of Street Fighter. Because the film insisted on trying to explain the origins of the green-skinned feral fighter Blanka and the stretchy yogi Dhalsim, ridiculous plot points were added in to try to bring some sense of reality to the story. In the process, many of the memorable moments from the game were lost, and the battle between Guile and M. Bison took center stage while characters like Ryu and Ken were downplayed. The movie entirely missed the point of the elements that made the game great, and it turned memorable characters into uninteresting dolts.

(Ironically enough, the first Mortal Kombat film is remembered as a much better movie than it actually is because it managed to stay more true to the story of the game.)

Alone in the Dark had a wonderfully creepy story told in an H.P. Lovecraft style, and yet it had to be dumbed down to become a studio film. Silent Hill was a genuinely creepy game that told a frightening tale of a fallen angel named Samael that had taken a grip on an Arkham-style town. The movie’s plot had to be condensed and altered to make the story more conventional horror. The Resident Evil games had stories that were too slow-paced to be a film, so the movies focused on high action instead of shambling frights. Doom was about surviving a horrific assult of demonic creatures while solving puzzles; it was turned into a big, dumb action movie that attempted to make sense of a story that didn’t need much explanation.

And therein lies the problem with trying to take an interactive experience and turn it into an inactive experience. A game can have a slow-paced story or a scant story precisely because the gamer is actively involved in the process. The story of a game is a means to an end; it’s the gameplay that the gamer is truly focused upon. Gamers become involved in the characters not because the story makes them interesting, but because the characters are genuinely interesting to play. What’s more, actions that are repetitive and uninteresting to watch in a passive context can be tremendously fun to execute as an active player.

And so, when I hear that games like Halo, Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda or God of War are being considered for the big screen, I don’t get excited, because I understand that while these games are exciting and fun on their own, they’re unlikely to be good source material for a film. Halo, for example, is such an action-oriented game that signficant retooling would need to occur to the main character (the Master Chief) to make the story compelling to an audience in a theater. Metal Gear Solid has a tremendously cool story, but it’s a game about stealth and patience, two things that don’t pay off well in an action film. What’s more, the goofier moments in Metal Gear Solid (such as the fight with Psycho Mantis) would seem awkward and jarring onscreen, even though they’re riveting during the game itself. The Legend of Zelda would be awfully hard to shoot with a main character who doesn’t speak, and God of War would be so brutal that it would be difficult to sit through for the recquisite two hours unless Kratos did something more than solve puzzles and kill everything in sight.

Are there any games that could make good films? Maybe, but three things would be required:

1) The story would have to feature a main character who wasn’t a loner — he or she would need to be a character who could interact with others and who could grow over the course of the film.

2) The story would have to have something more than just a bunch of action scenes. It would need to have an unfolding plot, with a structure to it, and a satisfying resolution at the end.

3) The story would need to have a great villain who posed a real threat to the hero, not a series of increasingly difficult foes. That villain would also need to be a character who could be developed over the course of the story.

Will we ever see a story like that? It could happen. But until then, I think I speak for many gamers when I say that it’s best for us to keep our games and our movies separate. It’s best to enjoy them in the medium in which they were intended.

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[Movie Monday] | SeanJJordan | April 13, 2009 12:43 am

4 Comments

By Benzion N. Chinn, April 13, 2009 @ 9:08 am

How about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That had a great story, a villain who is actually scary, a great cast of supporting characters and some nice plot twists. If I were a producer and someone handed me the Knights of the Old Republic as a story I would have gone with it. In terms of writing it is certainly far better than any of the prequels.
By SeanJJordan, April 13, 2009 @ 10:20 am

Hi Benzion, thanks for your comment!

I would agree that SW: KOTOR and SW: Force Unleashed are certainly potential exceptions to my argument, since both have solid stories. These games are what I would classify as outliers – games that are based on movies, but that have their own unique stories. Another good example would be The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, which has a story that’s actually better than the movies it’s based upon.

I do feel, however, that the story for these games is BETTER suited to being a video game than a film because, in all three cases, what makes the story fun is your ability to be in control of what happens within it. KOTOR’s biggest strength was its ability to tell a cool story while allowing you to decide the way your character would respond to it. Though your character had a dark past, you were in control of his or her future. A film would not be able to get away with such ambiguity; audiences would not connect with a character who was solely shaped by the adventure at hand. If a KOTOR film were made, the main character would have to be developed into a relatable figure… and that could result in stripping out the interesting parts of the sidestory (infiltrating the Sith Academy, potentially bringing an end to the Kolto trade, fighting in the arena) in favor of trying to make the “big reveal.” It just wouldn’t have the same effect it did in the game.
By Daryll B, April 20, 2009 @ 9:23 pm

Mr. Jordan, your reasoning is probably the most concise one I have seen about why the majority of video game movies suck and all are disappointing on some level to gamers.

Even though I liked Resident Evil and the animated Street Fighter 2, I cannot fault where you are coming from in the least.
By Jordan R, July 3, 2009 @ 11:11 am

Hey Sean, great article.

Avi Arad, the man who spearheaded much of Marvel’s film endeavors, has recently acquired film rights to two well known video games – Mass Effect and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, both of which I think could work well as movies.

Mass Effect (produced by Bioware, same folks who made KotOR) especially has a structure that, truncated, would fit a film pacing well. It has an adaptable and dynamic hero, a colorful cast of support characters and a compelling villain. Granted that all means nothing without appropriate talent around the project, but hopefully the talents of Mr. Arad will put together a solid cast and crew.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan