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A great film or book won't necessarily spawn a great game, and the gaming history is full of quickly produced tie-in cash grabs. But when a game gets its source material right, it's a joy. It makes the original better, adding secret chapters to the book you loved, or extending the streets of the meticulously crafted set you've pored over during various repeat watchings.
Got any ideas for games you'd love to see made? Got a pitch for an amazing Godfather game? Any thoughts about how, say, Back To The Future could work in an interactive medium? Let us know in the comments.
Dune
The adventure game was great and the RTS set a template for a whole genre, but there are more adventures to be had on Arrakis. We can do open worlds now, and sand, and big monsters. It's dangerous to take on one of the most loved books in the science fiction canon, but the rewards are great. There are interesting politics, well-defined factions, cool weapons (sonic blasters; wormtooth daggers, the wierding way) and interesting machines like Ornithopters and the infamous pain-box. Also: Mentats! There's a game in there somewhere. There must be.
Blade Runner
There was a neat Westwood adventure game that lifted environments directly from the film, but nothing else has come close to putting us on the streets of that overpacked city. Current technology may finally be capable of rendering environments of the required density to effectively realise that place. Last year Alien’s corridors were recreated digitally with remarkable authenticity. Imagine if the same diligence was applied to Blade Runner's megacity, and you could plod its streets as a world-weary gumshoe yanked out of retirement for one final job.
The Culture Series, by Ian M. Banks
Image: Consider Phlebas cover art from the artist's site at Salwowski.com.
There are still power struggles, however, worsened by horrible futuristic weaponry and technology that can read and manipulate minds. Severe existential threats to humanity’s population hubs are eliminated by terrifying “Special Circumstances” drones armed with manipulable force fields and knife missiles. It’s an extraordinary universe, full of humour, violence and big ideas about what our species would do with near-limitless resources.
The pitch: Consider Phlebas—the first Culture book—is a great place to start. The pirate-raiding premise lets the player tour the universe, and the hunt for a lost Culture Mind is a great hook, particularly when it leads to the dead planets of fallen civilisations past.
It would be wrong to talk about Ian M Banks in a videogames context without also mentioning The Player of Games, in which the Culture recruit an expert player battle for influence in an Azad tournament. Azad’s rules are never defined, but it’s the ultimate game—complex and free-form in a manner that allows players to compete on philosophical grounds. So yes, if someone could just design the ultimate game based on Azad, that’d be fine too I suppose.
The X-Files
How has there never been a good X-Files game? Because detective games are difficult, is the answer. But we can’t let that stop us from wishing really hard. Think of it—the dodgy ‘90s lighting, the big suits, smoking conspirators, small town America. The X-Files did great monster-of-the-week episodes that constantly transported Mulder and Scully’s bubbling sexual tension to fresh locations. And the monsters were fantastic—menacing and weird, but with a human dimension. Sometimes they could communicate themselves, but often they’re connected to human enablers, pursuing petty jealousies with supernatural conviction.
Alternatively, an Angry Birds minigame that has you flicking sunflower seeds into Mulder’s yawning mouth.
Akira
Words like “seminal”, “epic” and “transcendental” are overused in discussions about Akira, a seminal transcendental modern epic about about psychic kids and the end of the world. The film skips roughly three of the manga’s six volumes, but captures the finale’s scenes of body horror and mass-destruction all too well. The manga uses the extra volumes to picture life in the aftermath of what seems to ordinary citizens to be a horrendous and unknowable act of god. It’s a grim and difficult piece of work, and it’d be a mistake to try to realise the totality of Akira in an interactive experience. Having said that, there’s plenty of room for a smaller game set in the rubble surrounding the main events of Akira’s story.
Aliens
Videogames have been trying to do Aliens forever, but we still don’t have the definitive Aliens game (Colonial Marines was the last attempt and we all know how well that went). When adapting beloved series, the trick is to find a way to deliver the key beats without telling same story with the same characters. The “oh hey it’s Hicks” moment isn’t worth the following twelve hours you’ll spend knowing exactly how Hicks’ story pans out. So what aspects of Aliens should players care about? It’s easy. Attrition, cool guns and horrifying enemies that attack in swarms—mostly at night.
The Marvel Universe
The Marvel universe is doing alright. Their unstoppable movie juggernaut has done such a good job of owning the summer blockbuster season that I’m surprised we haven’t yet seen a movie about Juggernaut. So why not a game about Juggernaut? Because he’s rubbish. Also because of Marvel’s ongoing armwrestle with Sony over the rights to major characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men. That needn’t stop Marvel from capitalising on the goodwill surrounding The Avengers, though. The team are entertaining enough as Lego Marvel Superheroes, but there’s a much more exciting Avengers game hiding out there in possibility-space, situated somewhere between universes 616 and 617.
Doctor Who
How do you build game systems around a man who can go anywhere and enywhen in a magical blue box, and resolve any situation with a magic wand that fits in his pocket? How do you control a character who’s only interesting because he’s enigmatic and unpredictable? How do you fly a TARDIS when the whole point of the TARDIS is that it surpasses our flawed assumptions about how time and space work. It’s a stupid idea. Impossible! Who put this on the list.
The pitch: You can’t be the Doctor, and his companions never do anything interesting, so we’re left with… (scrapes bottom of barrel) a Dalek dating sim. OK Stupid: Putting The Mate in Extermimate. Jeez. Okay, let's go back to the companion. You may not have the Doctor's big brain and amazing gadgets, but he's a needy old soul. You must accompany him on his adventures, focusing his manic scattershot attention and ushering him in the right direction. It's a nanny sim, and you've been given a big angry powerful baby.
Jurassic Park
I don’t know how we’re still in this position, but there are no good games about dinosaurs. What do you mean “Turok”? Don’t talk to me about Turok. Trespasser? It’s funny, but not good. Dino Crisis? No. No. No. It’s 2015 and there are no good games about dinosaurs and that means we’ve gone wrong. We let ourselves down. We let Jeff Goldblum down. Dinosaurs—actual real-life videogame villains that lived on our planet—have never had a proper game.
The pitch: You’re stranded in the park and everything’s going wrong. The fences are failing and you have to reach safety without being eaten. Each paddock has a different species with behaviour profiles to exploit. You have a radio and Jeff Goldblum is on the other end talking to you about chaos theory and other rubbish but when you reach civilisation you discover that the radio was broken all along. A pterodactyl flies into the sunset and you the sun is Goldblum’s smiling face. “You finally found a way son” he says and the theme music over panning shots of your stupid, joyful, crying babyface. Far away, a brachiosaur moos in approval. Sam Neill is not there.
What series would you like to see games for, and what would they be like?
