Now that we know we should focus on the script, what kind of game story would you pick?
Seriously? Another trick question? It’s almost like this game is a metaphor for something. One of the hardest parts of adapting video games is choosing the right story balance. Ideally, you want a game with a rich but still compact narrative. Let’s take a look at two examples: “Warcraft” (2016) and “Need for Speed” (2014).
“Need for Speed” failed because studios scrambled to adopt something with strong brand recognition instead of something that actually screams out for a film adaptation. The original game’s story is purposefully empty so that the gameplay — car races — can shine. There simply wasn’t a story to adapt.
On the other hand, mythology-rich games like “Warcraft” suffer when adapted into movies, too. Trying to stuff over 100 hours of gameplay into a two-hour movie is a doomed effort, and it results in what the Washington Post’s Stephanie Merry called a “convoluted mess of an introduction [that] requires more mental effort than any movie this idiotic deserves.”
A better game to adapt would be something like “Oxenfree,” which has an eerie coming-of-age story that can be finished in about five hours. Still, a lot of modern games with strong stories also don’t need adaptations at all. “The Last of Us” has been universally acclaimed as one of the greatest video games of all time, and the actors’ voices and motion-capture performances were particularly praised. Changing this story to a live-action one wouldn’t add much more.
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