Games that would make GREAT movies

Pick One: Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

This was a simple one. Nintendo may never let another movie be made from any of its franchises ever again (aside from Pokemon) but they really should give a thought to their Zelda series. The story to Zelda is a story line that’s always worked: the King Arthur-esque, coming-of-age tale. Zelda’s got it all, an aspiring and idealistic young boy with high dreams of saving his world, quenching his thirst for adventure, a damsel in distress, old wise men, back stories, history, destiny, talking trees and, of course, epic sword- clashing battles. It’s a failure free formula.

Some may argue, “We’ve seen that kind of movie before!”. They’re right, but between films like the classic Star Wars, the epic Lord of the Rings, the shitty Eragon and the upcoming Hobbit, Hollywood isn’t ready to drop the ‘take up your sword young warrior’ storyline just yet. We’ve also seen the battle between good and evil taking place in the medieval times before as well, but Zelda is a lot like Star Wars and LotR in that it all is taking place in its own little fairy tale world. Its earth but a different dimension of earth. Perhaps it can be earth in a time that history has forgot. Have you ever noticed that the medieval world is the same almost in every film? It would be cool to combine the castles and knights in shining armor world with a turn of-the-century slant with flying/gliding machines and early industrial machinery. Its something I’ve wanted to see, anyways.

As far as direction goes I think that filmmakers like Peter Jackson or Spielberg could do it, but with this film being based on a Nintendo game- it’s a safe bet they won’t go near reading the script. Perhaps the studios could go for a younger director or whomever did the Harry Potter movies. Its really about finding someone that can handle a LOT of special effects work because bringing to life the world of Zelda would be difficult and expensive. Perhaps this could be a Dreamworks animated feature and just do everything in CGI.

Zelda OoT was the best written Zelda story I’d ever seen and I revisit it anytime I play. That alone is the reason that this game gets SOOOOO much gushy press, even after 10+ years since its release on the Nintendo 64. As a film, the story should follow what was in the game 100% because seeing how it’s a world we may have seen before, the story would have to be able to keep audiences in their seats. There’s no need to bog everything down with action and sword fights, because even that can get boring after a few minutes (Matrix: Reloaded is a fine example of too much). Link needs interaction and advice from all the legends around him that are honing and crafting him into the statue of bravery needed to assemble the Tri Force (Ala Obi Wan and Yoda giving advice to Luke). Therefore, good screenwriting is a must- not just great stunt/fight choreography.

Who would play Link? that’s a toughie. I would love to see the Ocarina of Time storyline worked into a live action film but you would have to cast many different Links to get the sense of how he grows older as the story moves. I think just about any of those manufactured, bottle-blond, pop stars that Disney cranks out could perhaps play young link (only if he can fucking act, though). The final version of grown Link would have to be a dead-on perfect actor- I’m thinking perhaps someone that looks like Hayden Christensen but a little younger and more Shakespearian in his acting (unlike Hayden’s painful acting in Star Wars 2 & 3).

Last suggestion: Keep infamous game to film director Uwe Boll as far away from the making of the movie as possible. If he should arrive on set, the order to the catering crew is shoot to kill.

You gotta be kidding me: ANOTHER Street Fighter movie?!

Watch Micheal Clarke Duncan sink his career
Oscar buzz is in the air right now. Who’ll come out on top? Heath Ledger’s amazing Joker performance? The outrageous portrayal of a dude, playin’ a dude, disguised as a dude from Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder? Or that Slumdog movie that I didn’t hear squat about until award season? Time will tell. We all know what movies can easily become Oscar bait- and rarely are we ever surprised by the winners. Admit it, we all knew Forest Gump would steal the gold from Pulp Fiction those many years back. As long as its sappy, has an all star ensemble cast, foreign, has a retarded-or gay-or otherwise tragic character (played by Sean Penn, Tom Hanks or some newer actor with a hard to pronounce name), then it’s a sure bet for an Academy Award. What amazes me is that the comedy genre gets overlooked nearly every damn year- comedies that make millions of dollars more than say, Million Dollar Baby.

One film that has yet to even get nominated for an Academy Award is any film based on a video game. If your familiar with any of these movies than its certainly not hard to see why. Maybe these films might get a technical nod, but I’ve yet to hear about them and besides who the hell cares about the technical Oscars? Exactly… moving on.

The problem is… I don’t think anyone has REALLY clamored from a video game to film translation of any kind. Perhaps the serious fan boys of the Mario games begged for a live action movie but a majority of the players couldn’t have cared less either way. Those fan boys suddenly were rudely greeted in 1993 with The Mario Bros film and if that wasn’t enough The Wizard was just a 90 minute commercial for the then upcoming Mario Bros 3 game (and oddly, it worked). John Leguizamo and Fred Savage are still trying to shake off those crumbs of shit.

Did anyone really ask for these films? Was it even worth the millions of dollars and man hours to make them? The only time that fans asked, fans got and fans were pleased was Mortal Kombat. It wasn’t Citizen Kane but in terms of game-based films its fucking close. Maybe the same could be said for the CGI animated Final Fantasy, but if it wasn’t for that features amazing visual spectacle than it would have died a quiet death in theaters and never would have become a gamers’ favorite DVD.

Well Hollywood doesn’t think that the pure and interactive storytelling of video games hasn’t been stripped, raped and strangled enough. This month the un-asked for Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li will come to theaters and most likely will TRY, TRY, TRY to be worth your 9 bucks but it won’t. This is pseudo-reboot of the dismally awful Street Fighter movie made back in 1994 (the one with French Canadian actor Van Damme as American air force soldier Guile). Those who remember 94’ know that the movie was horrible, hell I was only 13 and I thought it was crap. At 13 ANYTHING could have impressed me. What ruined it all was that the makers of the film felt the need to have ALL the fucking characters from the game be part of the story- which any screenwriter will tell you is an awful idea. This latest film seems to focus its story on Chun Li which might give the movie something to work with, but still even if its good it’ll still not generate much buzz outside of the gamer community. The point is, and my question through this whole article is “Who the fuck asked for this?”.

While games- like Mario Bros- have very little material in them to become movies that doesn’t stop them from being made. However some games have stories to them that are worthy of the silver screen. The problem is, once the film is in the hands of a director, and a producer, all hell breaks loose. These men and women of Hollywood don’t play video games and don’t care how the original story goes, they’ll just simply write one that suits them. Max Payne came out last year and wasn’t very loyal to the original game story, and nor was Doom two years prior. The original story to 'Payne was action packed, tragic, and spoke high volumes of government espionage (something that today’s politically charged world needs) however the movie reportedly is more about drugs and action rather than the suspense that kept us all playing. The trick that directors and writers need to follow is the same thing that keeps people playing the game should be the same tricks that keep us watching films, its formula that works in films that even ARE NOT based on games. We keep playing games to see what is next for us in the next level- we keep watching a movie to see what will happen to our protagonist next. The two genres DO go hand in hand.

So what games deserve to be green lit and might generate box office success? I have picked a few- mind you most of these games are my personal faves. Also bear in mind however just because I love the game doesn’t mean I will include it on this list. I love Tetris- there is NO movie in Tetris, just a Family Guy sketch. I’ve also included some reasoning as to why it should be made and also how I would make it, if I had such Hollywood muscle. Think of these upcoming entries as me being the producer of these stories. Since most of these studios nowadays can’t seem to come up with anything new it might be worth some of those studio heads to take a gander at this list and maybe (you better) write me a damn check. Couple million should be fine…

(stay tuned)

Early Gaming in a (plastic) Nutshell

Front labels- Nothing very special except for the plastic casing on the Donkey Kong cart being a beige plastic.

Top view of the carts- I love the Coleco logo on a Nintendo game playable on the Atari 2600, its like none of the companies knew they'd be spending the 1980's trying to phase each other out.

This pic below shows both carts on the underside. I noticed that the black Atari cart on the top of the pic has a special spring-loaded guard that covers the chip, keeping the dust out. Coleco's Donkey Kong Cart, has the chip section exposed. Atari was very forward thinking, but the mechanics probably made the carts a little more expensive to produce. Later in the 80's Nintendo would keep the chip exposed, making the cost to produce them a lot cheaper, and also make the 30th time you attempt to load the game impossible unless you blew into the cart until you blew a blood vessel.

Ah.. The 80’s the time of big hair, snake skin mini skirts, cartoon character underroos, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But fuck all that. To retro gamers there are only 2 words that mattered in the birth years of MTV: Nintendo and Atari.

The world of gaming today is very compact when compared to the 1980’s. Thanks to the CD media that dominates the world of gaming today video games are now easier to manufacture and also easier to destroy. All of us that have systems like the Playstation or even the early ill fated Sega CD can remember scratching a disc and permanently losing a 40 dollar investment. Perhaps due to insanity or due to high profits to be made for gamers replacing their destroyed games, video game manufacturers haven’t yet given the market an indestructible media for games.

Cartridge media in the 1980’s and on into the mid 90’s was THE way to manufacture games. Other companies with systems like the Turbo Graphix 16 console put their games on small ‘Hu-cards’ that looked like credit cards of the future- while it looked nothing like a bulky SNES cart the it still used the cart concept. The idea was simple and sane on every front weather it was a SEGA Genesis or a Super Nintendo: Electrical contacts feeding a game system information and displaying it on screen. The only drawback was the task of keeping those contact chips that protruded from the bottom of the cart free from the polluted and corrosive outside world.
I’m huge buyer of ridiculous but cheap and collectible crap. I love crap- as long as its interesting crap. Send me into a Goodwill or an antique shop and I’ll leave that place with something I never needed, did not come in for- but can’t possibly live without. In the case of last month I found two glorious gems: Atari Carts with unique and important gaming histories behind them.

Donkey Kong and ET: The Extraterrestrial

Atari had the gaming world in a virtual monopoly in the late 70’s and into the early 80’s. The 1982 gaming crash gave the company a huge setback that would allow Nintendo the opportunity to scoop up the mess and reconstruct the video gaming market. Or so the story might say. Many people exaggerate the 82 crash, stating as if the gaming market would have never risen again if Nintendo hadn’t picked up the pieces. The truth is, Nintendo was in the right place at the right time. Atari didn’t die, and the company is still in the market as a publisher.

Another truth can be seen in the pictures above, on the Donkey Kong cart. Coleco- the manufacturer of the cart , Nintendo- creators of the famous game, and Atari-the makers of the 2600 system, had themselves a 3 way business back in the day, all of them working together to make the first home installment of the most popular arcade game of that time. (too bad it wasn’t as good.)

ET has a much more notorious history. The film by Steven Spielberg was the biggest hit of its time, meaning that merchandising was fair game. And like its predecessor -Star Wars- anything you could slap that almost phallic alien face on would (and did) make money. Except for this fucking thing. Atari was willing to gamble the company’s future on what would be the first ever video gaming license from a major motion picture and subsequently they would later be falling flat on their face (or to be literal into a landfill).

Three crucial things were mishandled and caused the company millions and would give Nintendo an open field to play on.

1. Short development time: This game was a rushed effort and if you’ve been unlucky enough to play it then you’d know. The controls barely respond and the gameplay is needlessly tedious. It’s the worst day of your life- REPEATED. Falling into a hole 16 times isn’t fun no matter what famous character from a famous film. Famed designer of games like Yar’s Revenge was given a meager 5 weeks to bang out this game and even for the primitive technology of the 2600, that’s not nearly enough time. This was the FIRST time any video game was to be based on a big hit movie and they didn’t even cough up a decent schedule. Plus Atari spent a TON of money to license the game- which brings us to…

2. Bad calls with numbers. Atari spent over 20 million dollars to get the rights to make this game, and that was unheard of at the time. Coleco spent only $250,000 on the rights to Donkey Kong for the later made Colecovision console- so that puts it all into perspective. To make matters worse is even when the game flopped on its release, Atari had also made over 4 million carts of the game. Trouble with that is that there were fewer than 2 million Atari 2600 systems in US households at the time. The idea was that maybe system sales would pick up, but Atari should have known better since they had done that same damn thing with Pac-Man and lost millions.

3. The game just plain blows. It does. The object of the game is to make ET fall into holes and find pieces of his phone to ‘phone home’. However once in the hole a glitch in the game keeps you from coming out of the ditch. That points out the ‘repeated nightmare’ thing I mentioned earlier. I was just a baby at the time this game was made, but as a retro gamer I cannot believe this… thing was allowed out of the door at Atari corp. We all make mistakes but with a 20 million dollar + investment, mistakes should at least allow you to break even. There isn’t a strong enough word to describe this fuck up. In the end Atari was $500 million in the hole and millions of copies of ET were bulldozed and buried in New Mexico. The ailing video game company would later be sold and divided.

Now with histories like this, you’d think that these two carts would be worth some cash right? Wrong. I checked values of these two ‘gems’ and found that of the 50 cents each I paid - the carts values are only a buck apiece. Oh well, a dollar made isn’t bad. But for me the money's not the point, I now have two bits of gaming history that would otherwise been thrown away, propping up a table, or buried in New Mexico.

Wait, this isn't from the 90's at all. Shit.