Games that would maake great movies

Cafe Society
21

I don’t necessarily know that there’s a large enough sample to draw that conclusion. How many movies made form video games are out there? I can think of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat off the top of my head. They both sucked, but they were based on franchises that didn’t really lend themselves well to the big screen. Final Fantasy wasn’t all that bad. Great visuals, plot wasn’t any stupider than 90% of the anime out there. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t really count, because they just slapped the D&D name on an otherwise generic fantasy movie. There was an animated, straight-to-video version of Sin, for reasons that defy mortal comprehension. Oh, yeah: Wing Commander. That sucked big time.

Come to think of it, I’m sure there’re a plethora of Japanese cartoons based off of video games: I saw one made from Street Fighter that was pretty good, although I saw it all the way back in high school, so my memory is pretty vague. I distinctly remember seeing Chun Li’s naked breasts, so it can’t have been all bad.

I think that a lot of adventure games would make great movies. I’d love to see Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Maybe Loom, which was so short they wouldn’t even have to edit much of the plot.

22

Sim City!!!

23

I believe these are the only game to movie conversions:

Street Fighter
Super Mario Bros.
Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Pokemon The Movie (and it’s sequels)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Double Dragon
Dungeons and Dragons
Tomb Raider
Wing Commander
Resident Evil

Give or take a movie.

24

Maybe Halo or System Shock. Or the first Quake (much creepier than the robot stuff in Quake II

25

Almost any of the RPGs made by Black Isle and/or Troika could be brilliant movies, including Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, and Planescape: Torment. I especially think Planescape: Torment could be great because it’s very story- and dialogue-driven, very original, and the story is extremely engrossing. It’s got everything–self-discovery, action, a difficult and not-disgustingly-sweet romance, and a talking skull. What more d’ya need?? Plenty of room for special effects/set/makeup magic, too, being that nothing in it looked anywhere close to reality.

26

Add to Justin_Bailey’s list the upcoming House of the Dead, which already is obviously gonna suck (and be nothing like the game).

I think the main problem with video game movies so far is that they’re either based on games that have a weak storyline to begin with (Mario Brothers or Mortal Kombat), or they abandoned a good storyline for something cliched (Final Fantasy). If a game was used that had a strong storyline to begin with, and that story was adhered to, then it could be a good movie.

Another one that occurred to me was Max Payne, but I’ve actually never played it… just heard that it had a good story. Does anyone think it would make a good movie?

27

As a matter of disclosure, let me say that I liked Resident Evil a lot, and found Mortal Kombat wildly entertaining. Tomb Raider was also fun, though admittedly a bad movie. Conversely, anyone who found the Street Fighter movie as anything other than a colossal flying turd should be immediately executed so as to minimize the chances of something that inexplicably awful from ever again being made. Whoops, too late, someone’s making a House of the Dead movie.

And c’mon, a Metroid movie? Yeah, let’s take a game that derives 90% of its cool factor from the fact that it’s just you, alone, on an alien world, and make a freakin’ movie about it. A movie with exactly one character will be wonderful. Or alternately, they could throw in a goofy sidekick for comedic effect. Honestly, WTF?

Okay, done with my rant…

Final Fantasy seems, on the surface, to be a logical choice for direct translation, until you realize that it would necessarily be a 10 hour movie in order to not suck - which, paradoxically, would make it suck, because nobody wants to watch a 10 hour movie. Alternately, you just cut out the majority of the plot and character development, in which case it would still suck. Really, the Final Fantasy movie was just FFVII edited for cinema. They even used the same ending sequence.

So what would be good? Eternal Darkness, with some editing. Have a few parallel story lines going on, and cut the cast down to 3 or 4, instead of the 10 or so they had.

Halo would make a decent Aliens-type action/sci-fi movie.

Max Payne could make a decent movie, but that game was fun more for its gameplay than its story.

Luigi’s Mansion would make a pretty entertaining cartoon aimed at kids.

Half-Life, done well, could be phenomenal. Of course, since that’s such a likely candidate, that means that it would suck. They’d probably get Michael Bay to direct, and borrow the “writers” responsible for the Super Mario Bros. movie.

Gun Valkyrie would likely make a pretty good movie. The backstory is pretty interesting - a parallel earth that developed space travel in the early 1900’s, with a dash of Starship Troopers mixed in.

Myst, as much as I think the game franchise should burn in Hell, would probably be pretty good. Hell, the game is pretty much just a movie with some arbitrary puzzles thrown at it.

Wanna go old-school? Return To Zork would be cool. Hell, any movie set in the Zork universe would seriously get my hard earned cash. In fact, name an Infocom text adventure, and you could probably make a movie out of it. (Mmmm… Leather Goddesses of Phobos…) Leisure Suit Larry could make for a fun Porky’s-style flick.

And I think I’ll leave it there for now.

Seriously, though, any movie producers here on the SDMB? Zork: The Movie! Seriously, go to it!
Jeff

28

There was a previous thread on this which I can’t locate; there were some good ideas in there. I think Space Quest could be fun. Probably some of the other adventure games too, but I never played them.

Coincidentally, I just bought Super Mario Bros. on DVD tonight. I agree that it’s a really lousy film, but I enjoy looking for all the inside jokes, like Snifits. I thought Resident Evil wasn’t bad, you know, for a horror film, and I liked Final Fantasy. Tomb Raider was pretty bad, though. I once read a review of Street Fighter that I unfortunately can’t find anymore, but I believe it said, “In order to avoid the bad publicity from this movie, Raul Julia did the only thing he could - go into a coma and die.”

29

Planescape Torment would work but you’d have to cut out a big chunk of the plot(or at least the backstories. It’s taken me a couple hours just to wade through all the dialouge in some of the early sections. Not that I’m complaining) to make it work.

30

You’re kidding, right?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits withen borrowed Numerous elements from Final Fantasy 7. The Giant Space Cannon was very much like the sister ray, the Meteor, the huge glowing thing at the end that looked like the Lifestream from FF7. I’m guessing there are elements from FF8 in there as well, but I haven’t played that one yet.

31

I’m sorry. You think Metroid would be a bad choice because it has only one character, but Myst, which has zero characters, would be good?

32

**Pong **

33

The problem with the FF movie was that it was light on the “fantasy.” One of the coolest aspects of the games is how they throw together sci-fi and magic and industrial-revolution-era building designs and whatever else they can think of. The Spirits Within was, for the most part, just a CGI version of any generic Hollywood sci-fi action movie since Aliens, with a little bit of an environmental message thrown in. And a character named Cid.

As for the OP, it’s kind of a paradox. All the best games would make lousy movies, because usually what makes them good games is the opposite of what makes a good movies. What makes Half-Life so cool isn’t the setting, it’s the fact that you are the protagonist. Part of what makes the Final Fantasy series cool is that they have enormous worlds that take hours to see.

So you’d need a game with a cool setting but lousy gameplay. Which is, IMO, Crimson Skies. I liked it overall, but didn’t think it was fun – what sold me were the voice work and the setting and backstory.

34

Max Payne

maybe Metroid. The problem is it would just be one girl in storm troooper armor shooting things for 90 minutes. It would need a great script. Maybe have Samus talking to an advisor via watch communicator or something like that.

35

There’s really no need to adapt video games into motion pictures. With only a few rare exceptions, video games based on movies range from mediocre to putrid. As has already been pointed out, there has yet to be a video game movie that actually felt like a true film in its own right, rather than a weak attempt to bring the interactive experience of a video game to the non-interactive venue of the movie screen. The fact is, there’s a lot we put up with in video games that many of us won’t put up with in a movie because video games are interactive. Because we nominally control the action (and for other, more complex and less easily described reasons), we as gamers will forgive and even ignore things like weak plots and non-existant character development that we would decry in a film. Imagine sitting through a 30+ hour movie with the exact storyline of Final Fantasy VII, then come back and tell me what a “great” game it was.

I think the reason video game movies have failed is because games, by nature, are not - or at least have not been in the past - a storytelling medium. So far, every attempt to bring games to the big screen have tried too hard to recreate the experience of the game in some fashion and that is where they fail. If video game movies are to be made, and I think they will continue to be so long as gaming remains a big money industry, then I say, take the core characters, abandon all else and start from scratch. Approach it as a film featuring fictional characters that just happen to be from a video game, rather than as a video game movie. Attempting to recreate the experience of playing a video game in the medium of film will never produce anything but a mediocre product, so they should stop trying to do that and just make a damned movie!

All that said, I think The Secret of Monkey Island would make a fantastic animated film.

36

I agree. It also doesn’t help that the plot was almost totally incomprehensible. They spent an insane amount of money on that film and it flopped. I’m glad it flopped. It was nothing more than an extended FMV sequence. I personally find the FMV sequences in the post-SNES FF series as obnoxious as they are pretty, and I found the notion of an entire film along the same lines super-obnoxious.

The Spirits Within suceeded only in driving home something I’d already known about the games: the plots of every FF since VII make no sense.

37

While I would like there to be a BG1/2 or Fallout 1/2 movie, they’ll probably end up as derivatives of generic fantasy or Mad-Max. Come to think of it, all the good games seem to borrow plot devices heavily from the movies. Perhaps movies based on crap games then? We could have The Sims movie, which consists of people trying to cook only to set themselves on fire, running madly to the toilet in vain and repairing lights in a puddle of water.

There was some talk of a Doom movie, but last I heard they were trying to make it PG-13 [shudder]

I thought that the Perfect Park game on the N64 would make a good action-adventure movie. Come on, high tech gadgets, guns, tight clothes, what isn’t there to like?

Diablo could be made into a great movie, massive battle scenes against the legions of Hell, plenty of CGI candy, the Barbarian cracking heads, the brooding Curse Bitc - I mean Necromancer, the yummy Amazon and Sorceress…

38

Sorry, but Max Payne would make an awful movie. Why? Because the game went to great lengths to simulate a really, really bad movie. It’s a parody of every half-assed, hard-boiled “cop on the edge” crap film ever made. This makes it brilliant as a video game, but translating it back into a movie would just be a big reel of suck.

I don’t think Metroid would work very well for the same reason a lot of other games wouldn’t translate: Seamus has no character. This works in a game, because the player projects his own personality onto the character, but that’s going to screw anyone who tries to adapt it to a movie. Whatever personality they come up with for Seamus is probably going to disappoint most the game’s fans. To be a good prospect for being turned into a movie, a game needs a distinctive character to build the movie around.

39

I think you’re giving the game way too much credit. (Don’t get me wrong, loved the game, great fun to play.) The plot was an amalgam of every hard-boiled, one man against a corrupt system, noir action cliche in the book, but it took itself far to seriously to possibly be an intentional parody.

And it it was an intentional parody, then frankly they were just a little too subtle. It’s like making a really crappy movie and then afterwards it was an intentional attempt to send up bad movies. I don’t buy it.

40

As an addendum to my list, here’s a bunch of games to movies that are in various stages of development/filminmg/finished:

Finished
Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
House of the Dead

Advanced Development
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Mortal Kombat: Domination

Early Development/Development Hell
Crazy Taxi (I shit you not)
Max Payne
Metroid
Spy Hunter
Grand Theft Auto
Doom
Duke Nukem
Deus Ex
Devil May Cry
Street Fighter II