Films & Games, the relationship between

By John Huxley
24th May 04

Article Introduction

I wrote this essay for my Computer and Videogames university course. For my first essay it is surprisingly well researched and written, although some of the info might be a little out of date by now (it doesn't include the average Tomb Raider movie, for example). It is a pretty big essay, so make sure you take a break or the radiation from your monitor might cause unwanted effects. Also, a paragraph is missing from this version about the 'Global Village' which I'll add as soon as I can find the full thing. Enjoy reading.

Films & Games, the relationship between

Together, film and videogames represent the pinnacle of modern entertainment. As videogames go from strength to strength, their relationship with cinema hasn't exactly been an ideal one - it is this relationship I intend to examine over the following pages.

Early examples of films based around videogames include the animated 1982 Pac-man TV series, produced by Hanna-Barbera. This weekly show bore more resemblance to the Flintstones than the maze-based videogame, but at least they didn't torture us with another Scooby Doo rip-off. Pac-man lasted exactly two years and one Christmas special. In a similar vein is the cartoon adaptation of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. in 1989, entitled 'The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!'. Although shortly followed by the more bizarre 'Captain N & the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3', the show was undoubtedly a faithful and successful reproduction of the videogame(s), only serving to tighten Nintendo's grip on the videogames market at the time.

1993 saw the first feature length Hollywood videogame based production. Super Mario Bros. was a spectacular flop. Starring Bob Hoskins, Dennis Hopper and Samantha Mathis along with a large budget and expensive sets, the film bore little or no resemblance to it's origins, wasting a talented cast and golden opportunity. By 1994 Mario was loosing credibility fast, and Capcom's Street Fighter was wowing audiences in the arcades and at home with it's sublime fighting action. Universal Pictures were quick to snap up the rights and produce a film based upon the license, Street Fighter: The Movie. Fans of the game were disappointed by the low-budget farce they paid good money to see, reducing the main characters of the game, Ryu & Ken, to no-good street punks. Even the best editors in the world couldn't save this from the fate it deserved.

A year later saw a flurry of adaptations, as if they were in a hurry to emulate the failure Street Fighter: The Movie. However, 1995 would prove a vintage year for celluloid videogame productions. Mortal Kombat struck the right chord, providing nonstop martial-art action and revolving around the game's main characters, without trying to waste money on big-name stars. Hollywood had finally realized that the game sells the film, not the stars, the plot or the budget. The sequel, Mortal Kombat Annhilation (1997) and the live-action TV series (1998) diluted the formula somewhat, but still stand head and shoulders above the pitiful Street Fighter movie. 1995 also saw Earthworm Jim (a comedic platform game from Dave Perry's Shiny Entertainment) develop into a weekly children's animation for TV. Parodying archetypal videogame plots such as Super Mario Bros., Earthworm Jim featured such characters as 'Princess What's-Her-Name', 'the Killer Goldfish' and 'Professor Monkey-for-a-Head'. Both the show and the games were highly successful in the mid-nineties.

More recently Nintendo has been infiltrating children's minds with books, films, animation, games, lunch boxes, stationary, cards and just about anything else the Pokemon brand has found its way onto. The success of this series is unprecedented in the history of videogame adaptations, eclipsing even the Mario fever of the early nineties. There is one key aspect this success can be attributed to - the animation, games, and most of the popular products are controlled by Nintendo themselves, with Nintendo plots and Nintendo approved animation. This control avoids any misconceptions Hollywood may have had about the Pokemon brand, as exampled with the Super Mario Bros. film. Nintendo was keen to learn from it's mistakes, and the multi-million pound marketing machine has shown the rest of the world how it's done. Indeed, Pokemon isn't without it's imitators. Digimon, Pokemon's closest rival is produced in much the same fashion - game first, then animation, then film, then anything else the kids want to buy.

This kind of quality control is nothing new to Japan. Street Fighter, which Universal saw fit to develop into a cinematic farce in 1994 was also developed into an animation by Sony Music Entertainment a year later. As with the Mortal Kombat film, Street Fighter II: the Animated Movie used nothing but the raw ingredients of the game - over the top martial arts and colourful (if a little two dimensional) characters. The popularity of this film remains intact to this day, marking it as one of the best Manga films to be released in this country. As one fan writes;

"After the VERY disappointing release of the motion picture (ugh) I was completely certain the anime would do the series justice. It does. Most of the characters are there even the newer ones, surprisingly, and who else to center on than the favorite Ryu? The story line is very, very well done. All the characters are done well, especially Ryu, and to a lesser extent Ken. The animation is very smooth, and the fight scenes are outright amazing. The characters actually fight like they do in the video games, special moves and all."

There have been many successful Manga videogame adaptations - Night Warriors, King of Fighters, Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog have all translated to Manga with success. Manga/Anime should not be analyzed next to Hollywood productions, in this case at least. Different production values, a different culture and most importantly a different medium set the two apart. Animation, despite being time-consuming, is a cheap and effective way to illustrate colourful characters. Monsters, demons, super-beings, aliens (all quintessential to videogames) and anything else in the realms of FX can be conjured up with pen and ink with much more success than any Hollywood costume or computer effects allow. Bringing these videogame characters to life on screen, even with the special effects quake since Jurrasic Park, is a difficult and costly procedure, and the results are negiable at best. Only the biggest films, such as Star Wars, can afford to animate a cartoon-like character throughout the entire length of the film, and no videogame adaptation is worth that much in Hollywood's eyes.

Computer effects in films sometimes fail because they look too perfect - they don't lend themselves well to the dirty, misshapen world we live in. This is why animation succeeds. Despite looking nothing like the real world at the best of times, drawings don't pretend to be the real world. They are a world similar to that of a child's imagination, not set back by the laws of physics or the limitations of nature's colour palette. Videogames themselves benefit from this. Play a game such as Street Fighter and it doesn't matter that Ryu or Ken don't look like real people, or even move like real people. They are real because they are there, on the screen, in their own little Street Fighter world with it's own set of physics and colour palette. Bring a live-action Kylie Monogue on the screen with Ken and Ryu and the player starts to question this world. Why is Kylie here? Why does she move like that? This would have the same effect as many celluloid computer effects have...shattering an illusion of reality.

One film which goes some way to rectifying this is the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within film, set to be released later this year. Despite using computer graphics, the Final Fantasy film manages to create a believable world; it uses entirely computer generated backgrounds, actors and sets; providing total immersion to the viewer. Hopefully being produced entirely by the games creators, Square, will avoid the mistakes of the past.

Hollywood has never been able to understand other media. Books, plays, and more recently comics have also been subject to big screen mistakes. Each of these media have their own qualities which cinema does not posses and can never accurately recreate, due it's own limitations. Videogames are possibly the hardest of all the media for Hollywood to adapt. Games are not passive, they require interactivity, the user can't be told a story, he/she has to dictate their own narrative (of sorts). This interactivity, coined 'gameplay' by the videogames industry is the key to a good game. Super Mario Bros., for instance, is famous for copious amounts of gameplay; a Citizen Kane of videogames if ever there was one. The game has a simple, almost nonexistent plot and characters with no more depth than most inanimate objects. It is the interactivity, or the gameplay, that makes Super Mario Bros. great, not the narrative or the characters. So when Hollywood came to make a motion picture they were doomed from the beginning. Saturday morning cartoons can pass with lackluster plots and two-dimensional characters and still manage to be entertaining to eight year old kids. Try and sell the same formula in a live-action format to a much wider audience and suddenly it looses most of it's appeal.

Of course, not all games are like Super Mario Bros. Some have plots worthy of acclaim; Final Fantasy I-IX, Shenmue; while others rely on pure action to entertain; Street Fighter, R-Type, Tekken. Action games, much like action films, can entertain without the need for a lengthy plot or deep characters - the explosions, fighting and adrenaline are like a narrative of their own, a kind of ballet. Martial arts in particular can be highlighted as a form of entertainment that needs no accompanying assets. Proof of this, and proof that an action game can make a good action film is Mortal Kombat (1995). Nonstop martial arts and passable direction make for a spectacle if not a good film. I wait with baited breath to see if the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie can show that a game with a good plot can make a good film.

Another hurdle Hollywood came across while producing videogame based films is the fan base. A good fanatic demands quality, detail and above all authenticity. Street Fighter: The Movie had none of those qualities, instead opting to aim itself at a much wider audience, beyond the established fan base of the game. By alienating it's original audience and appalling it's 'new' target market, Street Fighter: The Movie shattered everyone expectations of badness. One aspect missing from the film was the game's oriental themes and origins. Universal, aiming at a different market, decided to turn Street Fighter into an all-American macho heaven. Sony, producers of the manga version, understood the fan's needs and more importantly; understood the qualities of the original game. Handing a text from one country to another is like a game of Chinese whispers - the end result is always different and normally inferior to the original. The addition of radically different cultures only serves to enhance the effect. This is yet another reason why manga succeeds where Hollywood fails; manga originates from Japan, the spiritual home of videogames, and as such manga relates closely in theme and style to videogames. It was no accident that videogames flourished in Japan at a time where manga was developing into the country's most popular art form. These two mediums were born together and serve each other hand in hand.

If Hollywood is to follow suit, it has to grasp the concept of the global village. **QUOTE MISSING due to laziness**

The games industry was in no better position than Hollywood. Throughout the eighties and early nineties, most game adaptations of movies mimicked the most popular videogame genre of the day. Platformers, popularized through Manic Miner and Super Mario Bros. were the subject of many of these games. Lethal Weapon, Batman, The Running Man, Wayne's World, Aliens, Star Wars, The Jetsons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hook, The Adams Family, Tintin on the Moon...no film was safe from a below-par platform conversion. Wayne's World; a comedy about two over-age rockers producing their own TV show; had no platforms in sight...especially no floating ones; so quite how the game's developers settled on a platformer for the videogame adaptation is beyond logical thinking. The only explanation for this kind of atrocity is the want for money, a cash-in. The games usually had to be released in time to coincide with the film's own release date, which set stringent time schedules, as well as a technological limitation at the time which prevented developers from recreating the films original atmosphere with any accuracy.

Another crucial difference between the current state of the market and that of the eighties and early nineties is the choice of adaptation. As with cinema adaptations of videogames, the success of your product very much relies on your original subject. If Eidos suddenly decided to create a game of The Sixth Sense, not only would their chances of producing a good game be slim, the movie it's based upon doesn't do them any favors. The film might have a great narrative, excellent direction and good acting, but how would you develop the game of the film? The lack of any real desrenable action, car chases, or anything else that can be viewed as prime conversion material means any game would have to resort to being an outvoted genre; a point-and-click adventure for example; or simply abandoned in the first place. This type of decision was sadly lacking from earlier film conversions, and goes some way to explaining the abundance of platformers at the time.

Platform games seemed to be the ideal solution to the problem - developers only need change a few numbers of an old engine, put some new sprites in, design some new levels and they'd have a 'brand new' game; despite the lack of resemblance to the original film. This formula often led to badly produced games, sometimes even incomplete. The Dennis The Menace videogame was infamous for containing an impossible jump within the first few levels; the rest of the game didn't actually exist and was released later when the developers had time to complete the game. Advertising came cheap too. The film's promotion was already out there, so all the producers needed to add was 'The Game' underneath the title and some screen shots (usually too small to actually see).

A special mention should be given to Street Fighter: The Movie videogame. A game based upon the movie based on the original game, Street Fighter: The Movie seemed to ebb awfulness from every ugly orifice. It was a fighting game similar in style to the original game, but one that eschewed any gameplay, looks, or any other asset the original contained. Universal's handling of the movie and the subsequent game read like a textbook on how not to handle foreign media. Indeed, Universal's mistakes with Street Fighter: The Movie were never repeated again with quite so much veracity. So, in amongst the Street Fighter madness we've been subject to one live action film, one game based on that film, two manga films, one game based on those films, one manga TV series (29 episodes), one original videogame and at least 20 sequels or variants across every platform since 1991 (including the spectrum).

These dreadful conversions would keep on coming as long as the public kept on buying them, and they did. The problem stems from how easily the Hollywood production companies would sell licenses, and how eager videogame production companies were to buy them. As videogames grew more popular and quality expectations grew higher, licenses became harder to obtain; quality, in turn, was increased. Of course, there were quality film tie-ins before quality expectations were that high. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Robocop 3, Flight of the Intruder, The Blues Brothers and Dune are all excellent examples of early film to videogame conversions. Most of these adaptations were, however, not the most popular genre of the day. It seems that to stand out from the crowd, you have to be different.

Robocop 3, in particular, is held with high esteem. Released on the amiga computer in 1991, Robocop 3 was a fully three-dimensional adventure way ahead of it's time. It featured an 'on-rails' style shooting section, a free-roaming car chase, a flight simulator and a fighting section. Despite all the different sections being rather basic by today's standards, Robocop 3 predicted the future of videogames, five years before the 3D revolution. Half the genres this game created weren't even coined in 1991, and add to this the fact that the awful film it was based on wasn't released until a couple of years later (making it the first movie tie-in to not be released in tandem with the film) and you have a genuine landmark game. Robocop 3 was a rarity. Not until the Playstation and Die Hard Trilogy (a game which mimicked Robocop 3's structure) would film adaptations reach those standards again.

Recent years have seen an about-face in Hollywood's attitude to film based videogames. Licenses (now harder to obtain in the first place) are not the hot property they once were, and even if videogame producers wanted to get them, they couldn't. Most big Hollywood studios now have their own videogame developers - 30th Century Fox, Disney, Lucas Arts and Dreamworks all have their own videogame wings producing games solely based upon their own film licenses. Fox Interactive, for example, developed the aforementioned Die Hard Trilogy, Alien Resurrection and Alien Vs Predator - all excellent games based on excellent licenses. This style of development means the studio can have ultimate control, and take all the profits. It also means the studio is taking a greater risk by investing more, but this also drives quality to a higher level, as anything but would loose the proprietor's investment. Lucas Arts and Disney, the first such companies, saw these benefits and the difference in quality was immediately apparent. Disney's Aladdin and Lucas Art's X-wing Vs Tie Fighter being prime examples.

As a footnote, arcades machines based upon film licenses have always been of some quality. Most studio developers don't have the time or the technology to invest into expensive (and arguably not economically viable) arcade machines. Third parties, like Atari, Sega and Taito have a back catalogue of excellent arcade games; Star Wars (Atari), Tron, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Star Wars Arcade (Sega) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being some examples of popular arcade machines from the past. Because arcades are generally more expensive and harder to produce than home videogames, film based arcade machines are few and far between, so quality control is easier and development time flexible.

The videogames industry seems to have learnt that films are passive, and to make them interactive takes a lot of thought, time and careful selection. The medium has grown with it's audience, and as the Playstation bought a whole new age group and culture to videogames, the film industry learnt to treat it with respect. Games, primarily thought to be the stomping ground of under eighteens; the easily influenced; were treated as just another product, another avenue in which to make money from the main event - the film. As videogames slowly merged into becoming one of the most profitable businesses in the world today the film industry suddenly stood up and took notice. Videogames were grossing more money than films! Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation took more money than the biggest Hollywood blockbuster that year, and as if two fingers up to the hand that once fed it, the videogames industry decided it was bigger and better. More in-house studio developers were set up to parry this backlash, and in turn film licenses dried up. This movement was for the better; videogames are now treated with respect, and the people who play them are no longer subject dreadful cash-ins based around Hollywood films.

Pokemon is the ultimate leader in this movement. Completely controlled by Nintendo, Pokemon is a multi-million dollar industry in itself, and the film based on the TV series based on the game was the biggest selling kids movies of last year, and probably this year with the sequel, Pokemon Movie 2000. As Hollywood tries to enter into the videogames business, and the videogames business enters Hollywood, we can only wait to see what kind of effects this crossover has in the long term. Certainly, as of now the crossover seems to be more than successful, and definitely more lucrative for both parties involved. If the Final Fantasy movie can set new standards in videogame film adaptations and Hollywood studio developers continue to produce high quality videogames, the mistakes of the past certainly seemed to have been learned.

-- John Huxley 24th May 04