The 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.
