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Why do Videogame Adaptations suck so much?

firefossil

firefossil

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It appears that Detective Pikachu may be the first videogame movie to achieve fresh status according to rotten tomatoes among critics, though a few others (Warcraft, Rampage, Resident Evil, Silent Hill) did so with audiences. Its also rare for them to be box office successes either. But why? Its true that videogames generally aren't known for their plot or characters or setting... but some are. And its not like for every good book, manga, TV show, classic old movie, etc etc, that there aren't a sea of mediocre and bad ones too.

I mean I guess you could argue that the things which make a videogame successful aren't the things that would make it suitable for film adaptation, whereas the things that make more literary mediums successful are more liable to... but from that perspective there is lots of schlocky works that in turn get schlocky adaptations that make piles of money too, and even schlocky movies can get favorable reviews for that matter. Reminder that with Detective Pikachu we're up to a grand total of 3 videogame adaptations with better RT reviews than friggin Twilight... most can't even beat Fifty Shades of Grey, an adaptation of a hastily reskinned Twilight fanfic. And these days comic book movies, which were once seen as little better than videogame adaptations, have become a sizable fraction of all box office returns and in many cases see wide critical acclaim. I mean in truth I could buy an argument like maybe the limitations of the source medium means "most videogame movies suck", I'd expect a few solid ones, just like even before the 21st century you had a few movies like the 1989 Batman one. Its one thing to be bad, another thing to be so resoundingly consistently bad.

Also what is it that you would want from a videogame adaptation that isn't being provided? Besides you know, not this:


Personally I'd say that live-action is often a mistake. Basically any 'mascot' videogame (ie a lot of the more popular and iconic ones) should probably be CGI or handdrawn, both because it reflects the source material better and allows for the exaggerated surreal aspects of those games, but also because while videogames are for everyone now, they were for kids first and foremost, especially the 'mascot' games. Live action works better for settings deal with more serious things like giant monsters wrecking shit or just featuring characters that look more like actual humans.
 
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Poor story telling, usually. I haven't seen that many, but most of the time they seem to put money into special effects rather than script writing...
 
Because you can't fit a 6 hour/100 hour game into 2 hours.

I've been meaning to discuss this subject in detail for a while, with specific examples in mind (mostly Hitman), but I think it can boil down to writers not understanding how to adapt one medium to another.
 
Strip out the players involvement/"control" over the narrative, and 9/10 you're left with a story that's just a rehash of other movies, jammed together with oftentimes incomprehensible backstories.
 
Because the core appeal of games is their active mechanics. Take that away and you don't have much.

Also, studios may believe that a film being an adaption of a game may be enough to lure in easy money and so put less than usual effort
 
firefossil said:
Personally I'd say that live-action is often a mistake. Basically any 'mascot' videogame (ie a lot of the more popular and iconic ones) should probably be CGI or handdrawn, both because it reflects the source material better and allows for the exaggerated surreal aspects of those games, but also because while videogames are for everyone now, they were for kids first and foremost, especially the 'mascot' games. Live action works better for settings deal with more serious things like giant monsters wrecking shit or just featuring characters that look more like actual humans.
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Checking Rotten Tomatoes, it's not like animated videogame movies fare that much better.
 
Videogames tell their stories differently from movies, TV shows, and books. With videogames you are an active participant in the story, with the others you are a passive observer.

That being said, David Cage's games would work as movies once you have a more competent writer and director involved.
 
rogthnor said:
Because games are an interactive medium, and that's what makes their stories special.
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Sarissa said:
Because the core appeal of games is their active mechanics. Take that away and you don't have much.
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Daniel Estacado said:
Videogames tell their stories differently from movies, TV shows, and books. With videogames you are an active participant in the story, with the others you are a passive observer.

That being said, David Cage's games would work as movies once you have a more competent writer and director involved.
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RPGs are the only genre to universally have choices affect the plot, and relatively few games have the mechanics tie directly to the plot.

For example take Swapper. Part of what made the game great is how the mechanics interact with plot's central arc of the nature of life and consciousness. By the end of the game I was astonishingly blase in sacrificing clones not to just to solve puzzles but just to impatiently travel around the map faster, on multiple occasions I got a game over because I literally lost track of which character was real and which was a clone. But then there's the actual plot... which is delivered entirely through text logs and audio logs that you wander across between puzzle solves. But for 90%+ of games its more text logs and audio logs approach to storytelling, rather than integrating game mechanics into the story.

So yes there are games which are bad choices for adaptation. Western RPG games where there is actual substantive choice, and other games where there are choices more substantial than "good end, bad end". Games that are introspective and deal with the nature of a game, like Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, or Undertale. Games with a strong sense of exploration and discovery, like Metroid or Legend of Zelda. Games that fluidly tie mechanics to plot like Swapper. The ideal target for adaptation strikes me as being a game which has:

*Iconic and interesting characters.
*Substantial worldbuilding and plot beyond the bare necessary required to string the game along.
*Being one of the games where storytelling and gameplay are more segregated than the stuff mentioned above.

But the thing is, it wouldn't be impossible to make a movie out of ones with significant interaction, yes would lose something in translation, but that's true for other works as well. For example Stephen King's love for internal monologues that put you into a character's headspace can't be translated to the big screen very well. Nevertheless while some of the King adaptations are shit-tier, others are decent scoring better than any videogame adaptation ever released, and some are even great.

Hykal94 said:
Because you can't fit a 6 hour/100 hour game into 2 hours.

I've been meaning to discuss this subject in detail for a while, with specific examples in mind (mostly Hitman), but I think it can boil down to writers not understanding how to adapt one medium to another.
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Hobbit (93,356 words) got turned into 8 hours 53 minutes worth of movie. Order of the Phoenix (257,045 words) got turned into 2 hours 22 minutes worth of movie. Or in short somewhere between 175 words per minute of screentime and 1810 words per minute of screentime, and those probably aren't the most extreme cases. Meanwhile there are mediums like comic books where there are endless arcing intertwining stories with no beginning, middle or end.

Moreover most playable videogame content is length-stretching filler with little plot relevance, and often contradictory to the plot content or thematics. It can be largely discarded without consequence because it had no consequence, if you made LA Noire or whatever into a movie, you'd cut out most of the extended nonsensical action scenes in favor of the typical number and placing expected in movie.

Arthur Frayn said:
Strip out the players involvement/"control" over the narrative, and 9/10 you're left with a story that's just a rehash of other movies, jammed together with oftentimes incomprehensible backstories.
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The thing is, that still leaves 100s if not 1000s of games to choose from that actually bothered to have actual story content, with any oversights or issues things you can just smooth out in the movie anyways. Even if you limit it to famous and iconic bestsellers there should still be a few, and many more which have elements.


I mean mostly the above strike me as excuses. They're things which could maybe make it more difficult to make a good movie, or require you to choose from a more limited subset of games, but that isn't the same as every work being consistently bad, mediocre at absolute best, and losing things in translation is a problem with every medium. I mean for comparison the converse, adapting movies and other mediums into videogames, has been an infamous and endless supply of shovelware indefinitely, but that hasn't precluded some excellent ones.
 
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If I were to name one reason for that, I would say it's probably because of budgeting.

It's "common knowledge" that videogame movies are bad, and therefore, there is no point in assigning talented directors or reliable screenwriters to such projects, which, in turn, creates a self-reinforcing loop of people with mediocre skills producing below-average works that attract more people with below-average skills.

For example, Rampage was directed by Brad Peyton, whose portfolio consists of such works as San Andreas, Journey 2 and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

In my opinion, it boils down to Hollywood skepticism. Now, if only there was a videogame movie equivalent of Iron Man to revitalize the genre.
 
Asura's wrath was a great show. It was a bit annoying how you had to keep pushing buttons to see the next episode though
 
firefossil said:
RPGs are the only genre to universally have choices affect the plot, and relatively few games have the mechanics tie directly to the plot.

For example take Swapper. Part of what made the game great is how the mechanics interact with plot's central arc of the nature of life and consciousness. By the end of the game I was astonishingly blase in sacrificing clones not to just to solve puzzles but just to impatiently travel around the map faster, on multiple occasions I got a game over because I literally lost track of which character was real and which was a clone. But then there's the actual plot... which is delivered entirely through text logs and audio logs that you wander across between puzzle solves. But for 90%+ of games its more text logs and audio logs approach to storytelling, rather than integrating game mechanics into the story.

So yes there are games which are bad choices for adaptation. Western RPG games where there is actual substantive choice, and other games where there are choices more substantial than "good end, bad end". Games that are introspective and deal with the nature of a game, like Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, or Undertale. Games with a strong sense of exploration and discovery, like Metroid or Legend of Zelda. Games that fluidly tie mechanics to plot like Swapper. The ideal target for adaptation strikes me as being a game which has:

*Iconic and interesting characters.
*Substantial worldbuilding and plot beyond the bare necessary required to string the game along.
*Being one of the games where storytelling and gameplay are more segregated than the stuff mentioned above.

But the thing is, it wouldn't be impossible to make a movie out of ones with significant interaction, yes would lose something in translation, but that's true for other works as well. For example Stephen King's love for internal monologues that put you into a character's headspace can't be translated to the big screen very well. Nevertheless while some of the King adaptations are shit-tier, others are decent scoring better than any videogame adaptation ever released, and some are even great.


Hobbit (93,356 words) got turned into 8 hours 53 minutes worth of movie. Order of the Phoenix (257,045 words) got turned into 2 hours 22 minutes worth of movie. Or in short somewhere between 175 words per minute of screentime and 1810 words per minute of screentime, and those probably aren't the most extreme cases. Meanwhile there are mediums like comic books where there are endless arcing intertwining stories with no beginning, middle or end.

Moreover most playable videogame content is length-stretching filler with little plot relevance, and often contradictory to the plot content or thematics. It can be largely discarded without consequence because it had no consequence, if you made LA Noire or whatever into a movie, you'd cut out most of the extended nonsensical action scenes in favor of the typical number and placing expected in movie.


The thing is, that still leaves 100s if not 1000s of games to choose from that actually bothered to have actual story content, with any oversights or issues things you can just smooth out in the movie anyways. Even if you limit it to famous and iconic bestsellers there should still be a few, and many more which have elements.


I mean mostly the above strike me as excuses. They're things which could maybe make it more difficult to make a good movie, or require you to choose from a more limited subset of games, but that isn't the same as every work being consistently bad, mediocre at absolute best, and losing things in translation is a problem with every medium. I mean for comparison the converse, adapting movies and other mediums into videogames, has been an infamous and endless supply of shovelware indefinitely, but that hasn't precluded some excellent ones.
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Interactivity doesn't just mean mass effect style choice wheels. Playing halo is a much different experience from watching halo
 
I was under the impression it was a reputation earned largely because so many movie adaptations were given to Uwe Boll, who ruins anything he touches.

Notably, written adaptations of video games are nowhere near as consistently bad, and I'm quite sure it's mainly because of the authors who do them. Mercedes Lackey or Alan Dean Foster may not be the reincarnations of Shakespeare, but they aren't the literary equivalent of Uwe Boll either.
 
Honestly I think most of the problem is that they don't capture the 'feel' of the game.

Like, naturally you can't copy the gameplay or the way it's told but you should try and tap into what makes the whole thing work.

For instance SOTC has both its loneliness and the raw scale along with the sense of tragedy even amongst the triumph of victory. You can't replicate the scale nor the length but you can make it a story about that.

Similarly you can make a Metroid film in either first person or in standard where there's a real sense of suspense and danger as she explores and probably has a fraying tension with her mission control and the potential for some real horror when Ridley or the metroids happen.
 
A good example to illustrate the importance of interactivity in a videogame narrative is bloodborne.

Now bloodborne is a pretty straightforward RPG. There are a few choices you can make which determines how/when some pretty basic NPCs die. But that isn't the part of its narrative which really relies on its interactivity.

No, the part that relies on its interactivity is the rally mechanic.

See, Bloodborne, for those you don't know is a soulsborne game. This means that both you and the enemy have relatively slow attacks which deal a tremendous amount of damage. It usually takes about three hits for you to kill an appropriately leveled enemy, and it takes them about the same amount of hits to kill you. Exacerbating this issue is that you can't abort an attack. Once you start swinging you are committed to it. So there is a tendency to play it safe, to only attack when you see an opening and are sure you won't get hit by the enemies attack. And this is how you play in the beginning. Bloodborne is scary, and so you take your time. You play it safe. You fight like you are some random guy who was given a weapon and told to go kill monsters. Which is exactly what you are.

But then the game progresses, and you start to learn how to play. And you master the rally mechanic.

In Bloodborne, when you take damage their is a brief window where you can attack the enemy to regain your health, and if done right you can heal nearly all the damage. That attack which took 50% of your health can be reduced to 1%. What's more, this even works on the bodies of recently dead enemies. So you stop playing so cautiously. You become aggressive, throwing yourself at enemies and attacking them with no regard for your health. If the enemy hits you you don't retreat, instead you redouble your efforts. Even when the enemy dies you will savage their body for a few seconds, tearing it apart with your weapon so you can heal a bit of damage. You start to play like a berserker, like a blood-drunk beast. Which is exactly what you are.

Now you could tell a very similar story in another medium. A book or movie could tell the story of a hunter who goes from scared novice to savage hunter. But you couldn't tell the story that I experienced. Because when I played bloodborne it wasn't the story of a hunter going mad. It was the story of me going mad. The game incentivized me to act that way. And I did.
 
Cadis said:
Asura's wrath was a great show. It was a bit annoying how you had to keep pushing buttons to see the next episode though
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Well come to think of it videogames adapted into TV shows is a thing. I've heard claims that the Earthworm Jim TV show actually pretty decent. More recently the Sonic Boom TV show was not only decent, but ironically ended up seen as much better than the videogame it was ostensibly adapted from. TV takes a more episodic approach, which in some ways can match the game formula, what might be a 'level' in a game would be an episode in the TV show.

Dream Logic said:
Similarly you can make a Metroid film in either first person or in standard where there's a real sense of suspense and danger as she explores and probably has a fraying tension with her mission control and the potential for some real horror when Ridley or the metroids happen.
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Metroid would have to be a TV show, and have to be done Samurai Jack style. Little to no talking, lots of atmospheric exploration and tension-building moments, with occasional bursts of sudden stylized violence. Also some irony when you remember that Samurai Jack was predominantly about the protagonist being on the receiving end of bounties, not the delivering end. As a bonus have a picture someone did of Samus in that style:
Ok I'd make the waist less ridiculously thin. But I'd totally watch the shit out of a Metroid TV show done right.

rogthnor said:
Now you could tell a very similar story in another medium. A book or movie could tell the story of a hunter who goes from scared novice to savage hunter. But you couldn't tell the story that I experienced. Because when I played bloodborne it wasn't the story of a hunter going mad. It was the story of me going mad. The game incentivized me to act that way. And I did.
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That's the sort of thing Swapper or Spec Ops taps into. But again that's the exception rather than the rule.

Dream Logic said:
Honestly I think most of the problem is that they don't capture the 'feel' of the game.
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My perspective is that the best videogames narratively speaking are probably going to be lousy choices for adaptation, because in order to be 'best', they have to take full advantage of their medium. The best choices for adaptation are probably more stuff like Warcraft, where there's lots of worldbuilding, characters, and plot points to work with, but there is basically nothing about the Warcraft setting that makes a videogame the obvious medium for telling those things in.

To paraphrase a comment from BTongue if you took a game and shifted its mechanical genre, would the plot still work just as well and have the same impact? If you kept the game mechanics but changed around the plot entirely, would it change the gaming experience substantively? For a lot of games, only one of those is true. Usually the latter, though sometimes the former. I think the example BTongue used for the latter is Gears of War... unlike the bloodborne example mentioned above, its not like the cover mechanics are there to reflect the methodical planning and cautious nature of the Gears or whatnot, in fact much of the plot revolves around reckless hail mary plans. Meanwhile shifting it into, say, a city-building survival like Frostpunk, another game that has a 'last city in the world' as a central plot point, would totally remove the Gears experience and be... well... Frostpunk.
 
I mean, it depends on that game really. But I think a really common problem with them is the layers of story abstraction, explanation and setup that producers and filmmakers feel the need to put over top the video game because they don't trust audiences to just accept the premise as given.

Doom spends a lot of it's runtime being about the marines learning that he facility is under attack by monsters, then fucking around in dark corridors only sometimes being attacked by monsters, talking about the monsters, then finally, eventually shooting monsters.

Or hell, look at the Sonic movie. It has the warning signs already. It's going to explain what Sonic is and where he came from, it's going to filter by an everyday cop protagonist, and it's going to give us Eggman's origin story instead of just coming out and making a Sonic movie.

I mean, holy shit even Max Payne does this. Max Payne should've been easy. Just make a westernized, dark Noir John Woo movie. Instead it needs to be a slow ass crime police drama and when you finally get some Max Payne action it needs to be 'explained' by him being on a super soldier drug.

Doom could just be an action packed horror action romp like Predator or Aliens except with demons. Sonic could literally just be a cartoon like literally any other cartoon that doesn't need to justify its own universe in a real world context like Wreck it Ralph or Kung Fu Panda. Instead there's some sort of filter that prevents Hollywood execs from being able to see the filmable core concepts of these games, and instead decide that they need to do the filmmaking equivalent of giving a pill to a dog by hiding it in a treat.

If Nier Automata had a movie the first 45 minutes would be about how the humans created the androids and the entire A-E route would be crammed in the rest of the runtime.
 
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Reveen said:
I mean, it depends on that game really. But I think a really common problem with them is the layers of story abstraction, explanation and setup that producers fans filmmakers feel the need to put over top the video game because they don't trust audiences to just accept the premise as given.
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The interesting question is why its persisted so much. Self-hatred of the premise as 'unacceptable for general public and thus bad' isn't unique to videogame movies. I mean for a great example from not that long ago, you had the Power Rangers release that was basically Teen Angst: The Movie and also some power rangers stuff in like the 3rd fucking act. People literally described in terms like The Power Rangers Movie Doesn't Actually Want to Be a Power Rangers Movie. But as you say basically every videogame movie does that. Or is not even trying like the Uwe Boll movies. Or is just WTF like the original Mario movie.

I mean come to think of it Angry Birds plus Ratchet and Clank are the only ones to even think of just making a kid's movie out of a videogame, and were thus free to be as ridiculous and silly as they wanted. Sadly the former managed to stumble into being Alt-Right propaganda somehow, while the latter decided to delete Ratchet's personality and have relatively little Ratchet & Clank scenes for a sizable chunk of the movie.

But yeah in general the decent or at least half-way decent videogame movies are ones that obviously actually gave half a shit about the source material while also knowing how to pragmatically adapt things as needed rather than just mindlessly copy the game mechanics no matter how weird it'd be.
 
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firefossil said:
But yeah in general the decent or at least half-way decent videogame movies are ones that obviously actually gave half a shit about the source material while also knowing how to pragmatically adapt things as needed rather than just mindlessly copy the game mechanics no matter how weird it'd be.
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This is what it comes down to.

For whatever reason, the people who have been making video game movies eithier have not played the games, do not have respect for the source, or are being compromised by people who don't know or don't care about the source.

Video games are still a relatively young medium. Superhero comic book movies have been hugely successful lately, but it took decades to get people who seemed to actually understand what they were doing. Consistently good video game movies might also take that amount of time.
 
I think people have summed it up in that there is a combination of factors.


Video games as a concept are still looked down upon, even with the rapid rise in popularity and that tends to increase the already bad habit Hollywood has of going with "safe bets". Name recognition. Problem is, the games everyone knows aren't the game always known for their story. Sonic, Mario, even things like Hitman, the story was always secondary and even the people who enjoyed the games rarely cared about the story. So when someone who's unfamiliar with the concept tries to fill in the holes, they fall flat.

The movies that do better (Lara Croft, Resident Evil) are the ones that get the basic concept and alter it enough to fit the medium. It could be entirely possible to make a good movie out of these projects, but we run into the issue of the standard formulas getting thrown in for mass appeal.

Heck, the only part of the Sonic trailer that wasn't panned was Jim Carey as Eggman. Why? Because he was acting goofy, and Sonic at its core is a really goofy game. But we don't get that for most of it. We've got some third-rate Marvel-style ripoff action-action-comedy. With freakin Coolio playing in the background.

That's not Sonic. That's an MCU wannabe.
 
Flare said:
Checking Rotten Tomatoes, it's not like animated videogame movies fare that much better.
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What was the Rotten Tomatoes for Professor Layton And The Eternal Diva? I always bring it up whenever people say "movies based on video games are always bad", but the responses are always a variation of "it's animated, so it doesn't count", or "it's Japanese, so it doesn't count".

Which doesn't actually explain why it doesn't count, I think.

I think a large part of why Eternal Diva was good was that it used the medium of a movie to present puzzles in a way that the games cannot, simply through the added dramatic possibilities. Also, it told its own story in the existing setting, rather than adapting an existing game (presumably shorn of most of the random filler puzzles), but in hindsight adapting an existing game story well might not be that difficult.
 
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