ScrewAttack's Top 10 Video Games that should be Movies. I got opinions about this.

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

10. The Elder Scrolls
9. Half Life
8. Bioshock
7. Uncharted
6. The Legend of Zelda
5. Halo
4. Metal Gear
3. Grand Theft Auto
2. F-Zero?!
1. Metroid


Ok than 10. How the fuck can you make a movie about the Elder Scrolls?! The problem with that is that where do you even start? And how do you explain the world of Tamriel to the audiance without making the series come off as a Lord of the Rings ripoff? If there is any game that is the least conducive of making a movie out of, this is it. I mean Warcraft has a more linear structure than this.

9. Another big thing to tackle because when people think of a Half-Life movie, they mostly thinking of Half Life 2. Because how do you make a Half Life movie based on Half Life 1? And if you want to adapt Half Life 2 it would be radically different in movie structure and you would have to give Gordon Freeman a voice and charcater to boot. The only way I can see a Half Life movie work is if it was straight up a Hardcore Henry ripoff.

8. Bioshock, Gore Verbinski was gonna tackle this project of making a movie based on the first game and considering the 2nd Pirates movie with Davy Jones he knows how to make nautical themed stuff work. Problem though, you main character in the first game was a mute with no character only things told about him. It'd be a visually stunning movie, but I don't know how they will pull off the story aspects of it.

7. Uncharted is already a movie, Next.

6. I have stated my opinion of Zelda before and it boils down to simplifying to game's structure to a more linear experiance. And you would have to give Link a character.

5. Halo already has a bunch of movies, animated and live action, in other media. IMO the movie should focus purely on Humans vs Covenant. Don't bring in the Forerunners, or the Flood, or the Prometheans, or whatever else the expanded Halo universe have.

4. Metal Gear is already a movie, Next.

3. I stand corrected, a GTA movie is even more impossible than an Elder Scrolls one, the game's themselves are ripoffs of popular crime movie's alrady. When's it gonna take place? Is our protagonist gonna be a Italian American Mafia guy like Tommy Vercetti? Is it gonna be Eastern European Guy/Russian like Niko Bellic? Is it gonna be a African American Gangbanger like Carl CJ Johnson? And year is it gonna be in? The only thing that makes GTA games GTA is the fact you steal Cars, and Reservoir Dogs alraedy did it.

2. F-Zero, eh they made an anime of it already.

1. Metroid is just impossible, the point of the game is isolationism and exploration and most other contact in the games is hostile monsters.

My advice to you Screwattack is be careful what you wish for and think better what kind of Video Games would be worthy as movies.

I mean I stand by that a Mario movie can work. But I recognize the issues of making it work.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

If we're going with video games that would make profitable movies, then maybe Evil Within. It'd be a spectacle, and they can pull a Ready Player One and just have a bunch of memes and pop icons in lieu of plot. Freddy Kruger or Pinhead chasing Gerad Butler as what's his face.
West of Loathing might work as a pixar movie, as its cute enough. Maybe Ori and the Blind Forest?
KOTOR might be fun, if you keep JJ's grubby little hands off it.
OH! Little Nightmares would be great!

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

9. Another big thing to tackle because when people think of a Half-Life movie, they mostly thinking of Half Life 2. Because how do you make a Half Life movie based on Half Life 1? And if you want to adapt Half Life 2 it would be radically different in movie structure and you would have to give Gordon Freeman a voice and charcater to boot. The only way I can see a Half Life movie work is if it was straight up a Hardcore Henry ripoff.

I'm one of the like... four?... people that actually like Half-Life a lot more than its sequel... so I immediately did actually think it'd be the first game. Frankly, the first game would be a lot easier to make a movie out of.

Open the same way as the game, with our man Gordon riding on the tram. Have Gordon riding it with a secondary character like one of the scientists, Barney, or Otis so that they can have a little bit of banter to establish character, while the scenery in the background establishes the size of Black Mesa. Have him go through the motions of getting down to the lab, then all hell breaks loose. First ten or fifteen minutes right there. The rest of the movie is pretty much just your run of the mill "escape from the disaster" movie. Have Gordon, Barney, Otis, and the scientists move from set-piece to set-piece on their way to the surface. Maybe have Otis get his arm stuck in a candy vending machine, and shout for the rest of the group to go on without him as he uses his other arm to shoot at some approaching headcrab zombies or something. Have him sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory, or perhaps have him show up later for an equally cliche hero moment - like a Black-Ops assassin has a gun to Gordon's head, then Otis comes in out of nowhere, body slams her, then gets up and chows down on a chocolate bar. Or maybe it was a group of Houndeyes attacking him at the candy machine, and he won their affection by throwing candy bars at them, so he commands them to swarm the assassin by chucking chocolate bars at her. They eventually fight some sort of big-bad enemy, then make it to the surface, happy ending! Credits roll, then some post-credits stinger with the G-Man, since every movie needs a post-credits stinger.

Or they'll just follow the Doom movie's playbook. We'll follow Corporal Adrian Shephard and the Marines from Half-Life: Opposing Force, as they fight through hordes of enemies who are now the result of biological experimentation because fuck the source material, and make a really shitty Aliens knock-off.

 

[Xprimentyl]

Meh, not a fan of movie adaptations of videogames. Book-to-film, though often poorly executed, is a transition of media that is more natural, at least foundationally: you?re taking a medium of pure description and visualizing it. Videogames, however, are already a visual medium with the added factor of consumer interactivity/control/input, therefore movie adaptations can only ever be, at best, one half of what the source material is. Same goes in the other direction; videogame adaptations of films tend to be little more than made-up busy work based loosely around the rigid source material of the film which often makes them watered down and largely pointless exercises, i.e.: Spider-Man 2 was great fun swinging around like the ?real? Spider-Man for the first time in gaming, but never once in the film did Spider-Man spend inordinate amounts of timing responding to random and repetitive criminal encounters like we did in the game; the game would have greatly benefitted from just being called ?Spider-Man? with a story completely independent of the events of the film.

That being said, of those listed, the only one I wouldn?t mind seeing brought to screen (since videogame movies are going to be a thing anyway) would be Bioshock. I imagine it?d be hard to sell a lot of the Plasmids without egregious amounts of eye-rolling in the audience, but the creepy, dilapidated underwater city, Big Daddies, sympathetic-yet-terrifying Little Sisters and the myriad maniacal Splicers all visualized with modern CGI would make for some incredible screen moments. Plus the themes of ?implied control? and ?hyperbole brought to life and ruin? could also make for some intellectually stimulating writing beyond the spectacle of the latter imagery, y?know, kinda what made Bioshock a stand-out game in the first place.

The other games? No; they?re best played. And if you want to watch a ?movie? of them, I?m sure there are dozens of flawless playthroughs on YouTube that, by their very nature of being the game, will adhere more closely to the source material (itself) than any film could ever hope to.

 

[CaitSeith]

10. How do you explain the world of Tamriel to the audiance without making the series come off as a Lord of the Rings ripoff?

How did it The Chronicles of Narnia? Or Games of Thrones? With what makes them peculiar. Let the Kaijit show it to the audience. Kaijit are travelers. Kaijit see all Tamriel (or at least the relevant parts for the plot and backstory). Skyrim plot is the most accessible (everyone can understand a dragon invasion), but Oblivion sounds more interesting. Or they could use one of the stories from the countless books you can read in the games.

7. Uncharted is already a movie, Next.

4. Metal Gear is already a movie, Next.

No, they are not. The camera angles, objects and events locations relative to the attention focus on the scenes makes an awkward experience for a passive audience in a movie theater (and it needs loads of editing to remove/replace the playable segments)

2. F-Zero, eh they made an anime of it already.

And?

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Screwattack are still around?! Wow. Nice to hear.

I used to watch their stuff almost religiously about 6-7 years ago. After they lost Destin and Corey and Jared and Jose though...I kinda just lost interest. Destin was the hardest loss, I feel. He was just great and it was a shame he left.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

The most surprising thing here is that ScrewAttack is still around. I used to follow them before I came here. Thought they'd gone under years ago.

 

[BrawlMan]

Honestly, ScrewAttack has not been that good since 2011. Once 2012 hit with certain people leaving, they just seem to get worse and worse. They're top 10s especially. Especially the one that was called the top 10 franchises that must die. It was just a straight-up clickbait and fan haters to whether or franchise you loved. Then there's the fact they really don't do much content anymore and are only surviving on YouTube. Take whatever they say with a super small grain of salt, because most people aren't listening.

Shoot anybody can do a better top 10 than that.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Screwattack are still around?! Wow. Nice to hear.

I used to watch their stuff almost religiously about 6-7 years ago. After they lost Destin and Corey and Jared and Jose though...I kinda just lost interest. Destin was the hardest loss, I feel. He was just great and it was a shame he left.

The most surprising thing here is that ScrewAttack is still around. I used to follow them before I came here. Thought they'd gone under years ago.

Honestly, ScrewAttack has not been that good since 2011. Once 2012 hit with certain people leaving, they just seem to get worse and worse. They're top 10s especially. Especially the one that was called the top 10 franchises that must die. It was just a straight-up clickbait and fan haters to whether or franchise you loved. Then there's the fact they really don't do much content anymore and are only surviving on YouTube. Take whatever they say with a super small grain of salt, because most people aren't listening.

Shoot anybody can do a better top 10 than that.

Death Battle is still keeping those guys afloat:

 

[Silvanus]

1. Metroid is just impossible, the point of the game is isolationism and exploration and most other contact in the games is hostile monsters.

Why does this preclude it from adaptation into a movie? Films have been made featuring only a single character for most of their running time before (and some of them have been damn good, such as Locke or 127 Hours).

 

[fix-the-spade]

10. The Elder Scrolls
9. Half Life
8. Bioshock
7. Uncharted
6. The Legend of Zelda
5. Halo
4. Metal Gear
3. Grand Theft Auto
2. F-Zero?!
1. Metroid

10. It's called The Lord of the Rings
9. A film about the Seven Hour War could certainly work, but anything involving Gordon Freeman is doomed because they'll make him speak.
8. No.
7. It's already an action movie.
6. Also no, same reason as Half Life, unless they want to make a movie with Ganon as the protagonist.
5. Already been done, the Halo verse is boringly Spartan-centric anyway.
4.I agree with you entirely.
3. Already is, again.
2. This one could work great, just make Rush or Days of Thunder but with rocket hovercraft that can do loops.
1. A film about the G-Fed Marines could work. For example a story centering around the Marines stranded on Aether and their efforts to survive the Ing. Obviously the plot would have to deviate from the game as they would have to survive more than a few hours. Samus could also appear at the end as the mute Deus Ex Machina machine that she is, something every bit as alien and dangerous as the Ing. But like Half Life it would most likely fail by having very much talking Samus.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Death Battle is still keeping those guys afloat:

But it's years since they did Fox McCloud vs Bucky O'Hare, there are no other episodes necessary.

 

[Chewster]

Can anyone please explain this bizarre obsession some gamers seem to have with making "good" film adaptations of video games? Like, who the fuck actually wants video games made into films? Is this some sort of holdover from the stupid "video games are for kids" days or something? Like if we just get that one good adaptation than wider society will finally take our hobby seriously? The industry already does gangbusters, it's as established as a medium ever could be.

Why does anyone even want this to happen? Half of AAA games are already voiced by Hollywood actors and actresses for fuck's sake. Just...no.

 

[Silvanus]

10. It's called The Lord of the Rings

Because they both have elves and dwarves?

People like to say that almost everything is derivative of Tolkien's work, when it usually only fits with a lot of stretching-- to the point at which the work is unrecognisable. The setting, plot, tone, and background mythology in The Elder Scrolls are hugely different.

9. A film about the Seven Hour War could certainly work, but anything involving Gordon Freeman is doomed because they'll make him speak.

How about one based on Blue Shift or Opposing Force, then?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

And how do you explain the world of Tamriel to the audiance without making the series come off as a Lord of the Rings ripoff?

Isn't it?

 

[Poetic Nova]

Technically, GTA has a movie if short, it's 12 minute long, and footage for that was used in GTA2 in the intro.

 

[fix-the-spade]

10. It's called The Lord of the Rings

Because they both have elves and dwarves?

People like to say that almost everything is derivative of Tolkien's work, when it usually only fits with a lot of stretching-- to the point at which the work is unrecognisable. The setting, plot, tone, and background mythology in The Elder Scrolls are hugely different.

Any Elder Scrolls film will end up looking and sounding like a Lord of the Rings ripoff, no studio would be brave enough to set a film in Morrowind, Elsweyr, Black Marsh or The Shivering Isles. So it'll be the Empire looking like Roman-ish Gondorians whilst High Elves run around fighting dragons or the followers of one of the less charitable Gods, it would be terrible.

The Lord of the Rings basically killed fantasy films for a generation at least. Nobody is likely to do any better and paradoxically nobody dare try anything different. Elder Scroll's vast lore would be a problem too, it would probably fall into the Warcraft trap of trying to cram too much plot into a single film to establish the world and characters, trying to summarise it quickly would end up looking like the opening of Lord of the Rings again.

Also, Elder Scrolls has no Dwemer, they annoyed Akatosh too much and even before they did they weren't dwarves.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

GTA REALLY doesn't need a movie. Just watch pretty much any Crime/Heist film out there and there you go.

The Elder Scrolls could work. I mean, they actually got Warcraft to work somewhat, even if it wasn't the best film I've seen at all. It would definitely have to be a side-story thing though, split from the main games. As in like, not even acknowledging the main protagonists (player characters) in them.

What would be really awesome is if they did a Guild Wars movie of the Searing and the Foefire both. For those who don't know, the humans are at war with a cat-like race called the charr. A lot of them later retreat to other lands and call off the war but there remains a resistance core within Ascalon (one of the main human cities) that's bound and determined to keep fighting an increasingly desperate war. Long story short, king of Ascalon goes mad and uses a legendary weapon to cast an insanely powerful and nasty spell that not only destroys EVERY LIVING THING in the immediate area but also tears the souls of all the humans in Ascalon from their bodies and dooms them to walk the land, continually warring with the charr in the area with an eternal hatred, never truly dying. Never ceasing. Never resting.

 

[BrawlMan]

Screwattack are still around?! Wow. Nice to hear.

I used to watch their stuff almost religiously about 6-7 years ago. After they lost Destin and Corey and Jared and Jose though...I kinda just lost interest. Destin was the hardest loss, I feel. He was just great and it was a shame he left.

The most surprising thing here is that ScrewAttack is still around. I used to follow them before I came here. Thought they'd gone under years ago.

Honestly, ScrewAttack has not been that good since 2011. Once 2012 hit with certain people leaving, they just seem to get worse and worse. They're top 10s especially. Especially the one that was called the top 10 franchises that must die. It was just a straight-up clickbait and fan haters to whether or franchise you loved. Then there's the fact they really don't do much content anymore and are only surviving on YouTube. Take whatever they say with a super small grain of salt, because most people aren't listening.

Shoot anybody can do a better top 10 than that.

Death Battle is still keeping those guys afloat:

I know. But even that is really interesting for me at least.

 

[sXeth]

AS someone on Twitter put it (I forget who), the problem with a ton of videogame movies is that most videogames could already be considered the videogame version of some other movie. So you just end up with a nesting set of knockoffs. The most blatant from that list of course is that Uncharted would essentially just be knockoff Indiana Jones if you did it as a movie. Not that you couldn't make a decent basic action move out of them, but its never going to be some classic standard because of the derivation already going on.

The other blatant problem is pacing. Videogames tend to be longer in general then movies. There are huge spaces with literally no plot development sometimes while gameplay carries the player onward. There's usually a lack of downtime moments in general, because in a game thats dead space without player input.

Then there's the interactive element. Most games, particularly those often seen as cinematic or narrative, have some degree of options to them. Whether its in actual storyline or character development choices, which is a huge hurdle if you try and create one canonical narrative in a film. Or simply in approach. Does movie Bioshock dude use guns or vigors? Which ones? You can try and include all approaches, though that will ring untrue to many game fans, because its not how the game worked, and untrue to newcomers, because the character seems inanely competent and overpowered.


Though out of that list, the funniest one is GTA. What does GTA have to offer a movie? Hell, most of the GTA's are pretty obvious homages to actual classic movies. I'd say at best you'd end up with some weird parody version of Fast and the Furious, which already started parodying itself more or less.