Me-Too-Wood - quadsniper17's Blog

quadsniper17's Blog

Me-Too-Wood

Posted on February 20, 2019 at 10:55 PM.

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It's amazing that for all its posturing about eclipsing Hollywood blockbuster opening numbers and interactive entertainment making a serious dent in TV audiences, the gaming industry still continues to draw most of its inspirations from movies and -- in more recent times -- television. Given the facts that the vast majority of movies are either based on popular pieces of literary fiction or historical events, and that movies themselves suffer from a high degree of sequelitis and remakeitis, the reliance on letting big bud Hollywood bust open trends to fuel its most popular genres shows how immature the games biz still is.

Action and adventure games have been derivative of Hollywood for years. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. But for every Shadow of the Colossus, Wario Ware or Katamari Damacy, there's an army of� well, army games, if you've been paying attention in the last few years. When Saving Private Ryan shocked audiences by putting a brutally realistic face on the 1944 Normandy Invasion, it's almost like a lamp went on above the heads of every developer and publisher in the business. You could've started a countdown to when game company after game company would poop out World War II games.

Three years later, HBO debuted the excellent miniseries Band of Brothers. Its depiction of the frighteningly hopeless parachute drops inspired many to bring WWII paratroopers to the forefront in videogames. That same year, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down made sure that every game developer suddenly knew how to spell Mogadishu -- and there hasn't been a modern war game since that hasn't somehow referenced the helicopter by name or with an in-flight opening scene.

It's not just the war game genre that seems to have a permanent tube attached to Hollywood's hypothalamus, either. When Lord of the Rings brought fantasy mass battles to the big screen, it was almost like a wake-up call to developers that modern game consoles could handle larger numbers of slaughter-ready units on-screen. Now hordes of orcish enemies flood the plain planes in Kameo and even Nintendo's long-running Legend of Zelda franchise isn't immune to the influence of Peter Jackson's visualization of the famous Tolkien novels: Twilight Princess features a Balrog-like boss and goblins riding boars that seem only half removed from the movie Wargs. Gladiator made the tragic warrior hero cool again, while The Fast and the Furious made sure every non-league car racer suddenly featured street racing at night, drifting, and neon-green cars with NOS upgrades. I'm not even going into how niche movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch brought back heroes with British accents and made bald heads cool again.

Themes in videogames have become so predictable, we should institute a Hollywood + 2 years clock on our sites (it used to be Hollywood + 1, but development time increases haven't been kind to movie-style games). It's great that popular -- and at times even good -- movies inspire people in all walks of life, but gaming needs to be able to establish trends of its own and do away with this lemming formula. Part of it is that more powerful new graphics, sound and storage technologies are enabling game experiences that closely mirror big blockbuster movies. In the early days of gaming, creating a three-colored sprite that looked like a muscle-bound gladiator players could actually recognize wasn't easy -- which gave rise to simple heroes and sprites, like frogs, a yellow puck with a hunger for pills, and a fat contractor. Limitations were a huge factor, giving game developers a reason to let their imagination run free and create clever and often surreal scenarios to set their games in. Nowadays, games like these simply wouldn't sell anymore as gamers crave themes and eat movie-like experiences (especially those with guns) up faster than you could say "Pac."

That's fine. There's a time and place for movie-like experiences. Heck, I'm bashing zombies in a new Xbox 360 game, which is oozing Dawn of the Dead in every moment of its 72-virtual-hour playtime, and I've having a good time doing so. But I only need to walk past my book shelf to see inspiration in every corner; ideas for videogames set in many eras and many countries. There are Arthurian legends (The Once & Future King, Morte D'Artur), fairy tales from every corner of the world, Jules Verne novels that go to the depth of the ocean in iron submarines and in helicopter ships to the very ceiling of the sky, the fantasy wealth of the Greek, Germanic, and Norse Myths -- all packed with intrigue, dragons, and perilous travels, sci-fi sparks of genius by Vonnegut, Lem and Dick, swashbuckling adventures by Stevenson, Kipling, Dumas, and Defoe, excursions into madness by Cervantes and Dostoyevsky, or even modern fiction like Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series or Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs -- the list is endless.

There are of course titles that find their inspiration in literary works. Look no further than recent and upcoming games like God of War or Too Human to look back in time and flip Hollywood a big, fat bird. I'd pay good money for a movie-like game that let's me play as a survivor of a shipwreck, exploring an unknown island and figuring out how to build tools and survive. Or how about a title developed by the game industry's elite that casts players for once not as a thug in the hood or a soldier, but as an air marshall, an ambulance driver, an aging detective in the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl (not the kind swarming with mutated monsters, but ruthless criminals and terminally sick and engaging characters)? Let me storm the Bastille with a musket in hand -- not Omaha Beach for the WWIIth time. Is there a reason game companies can't make an action shooter set in World War I? Is the umbilical cord that connects them to Hollywood that short that it only lets them dip their toes into the inspirational pools of Vietnam, Desert Storm and WWII? The first World War is brimming with deadly technology (yes, they had tanks, planes, airships, and big, fat machine guns), nasty adversaries, and fierce battles -- do we really need to wait until Hollywood tackles it before game publishers figure it out?

If you get all your war history knowledge comes from action games, WWI or anything before that didn't actually happen.

I don't think gaming without licensed titles and those taking inspiration from movies is what anyone's looking for. But I've got to wonder what time the wake-up call is set for that helps action and adventure gaming break out from its little brother status. When will the games everyone's talking about seek inspiration not in the big-boom blockbuster movies, but cut out the middle-man and look toward the material that inspired them in the first place.