Video Games and Movies or Video Game Movies?

By Tye Van Horn
Elm Staff Writer

Lately, I’ve noticed an extremely abundant amount of modern video games having their movie rights purchased. This ever growing list includes “Red Dead Redemption,” “Halo,” “Bioshock,” “Spyro the Dragon,” “Metroid” and many other extremely valuable licenses.

I thought, hey, that’d be cool to have a “Metroid” movie, or a “Red Dead” movie, or even a “Spyro” movie. The developers and their games deserve to get recognition outside the gaming community, and deserve to branch to other media. After more consideration though, I begin to wonder. Do we really want to take a developer’s work and put it in the hands of what could potentially be a non gamer? This hasn’t worked in the past, with book-based movies being extremely unpredictable with their quality. Should we trust anyone but Shigeru Miyamoto to personify our silent hero? Who knows what they’d change.

While I respect an interpretation, the original meaning of the piece often gets lost in translation. I remember the comic book movie trend that had swept the country a few years ago, and I remember also how hit and miss it was. Yes there were movies like Iron Man that took an unpopular superhero and made him famous, but do you remember Spiderman? I shudder to consider how they took a great comic book hero and made my affection for him wane. Do I want them to do that to, lets say, “Metroid?” And what if the trend persists? Do I want “Legend of Zelda” to be a movie?

The main problem with a video game movie trend is the fact that any director is too unpredictable, and that there will be hits and there will be flops. I don’t think it’d be fair just because “Zelda The Movie” is a flop and lets say a Bomberman movie was amazing, that in the non-gaming world “Zelda” now has less notoriety than Bomberman.

On the other hand nerd movies in general can be awesome and give the recognition it deserves, like despite the fact that the movie did horribly in the box office, “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” was one of the best movies I have ever seen. A comic that I probably would have never read and a game I would probably have never played were suddenly in my hands because of two directors that just got it.

Valve, the creators of “Half Life” and “Portal,” recently announced that they would never allow anyone but themselves to make a movie based on their own franchises. Perhaps that is the key to it all. In order for the spirit of a work to remain, perhaps the developer should have the final say in what should or shouldn’t be represented in film. This is a difficult if not impossible thing to enforce, but it seems that there are few options since with the growing medium film representations of games are inevitable.

So what do you think, gamers? Are you excited about the prospect of games getting more recognition? Or do you think that games should be let to be games and movies let to be movies?