As a rule, adaptations - game to movie, movie to game, book to movie, even book to game, are shit.
Of course there are exceptions, but the rule usually stays in place because an adaptation has a core problem: you have to appeal to two very different audiences. This raises a serious problem - these audiences want different things.
The first audience are the hardcore fans, the ones that made the adaptation so popular that someone thought it would be a good idea to make some serious cash out of it. These hardcore fans will be expecting nothing but a verbatim pixel-by-pixel recreation, just with addition or removal of interactivity. For example, if you're a fan of the Half-Life series, you'd want want the(hypothetical) movie adaptation to have pretty much everything in it that was in the gane, the same lines, the Combine look the same, the people to look the same, etc. You wouldn't wont anything taken out, and you would be angry if they did.
The second audience is the mainstream consumer, the non-fans that are just looking for something to entertain them. They outnumber the hardcore fans substantially. They don't want a recreation of the original product, because the original product isn't as acessible to them. Imagine someone who has never played a Metal Gear game watching a movie adaptation of an MGS game. Their face would go blank whenever something wasn't exploding and they wouldn't GET the movie and as a result dislike it.
This is the core of the problem. If you're making an adaptation, you have to appeal to BOTH audiences, the hardcore and the mainstream. These two species don't often coexist peacefully. Most games are around ten to twenty hours long (a lot are much longer ie. Final Fantasy). A movie can't be longer than three hours, especially if you want it to market it to the mainstream consumer - fourteen-to-twenty-year-olds - who have short attention spans. So you have to cut things out - sequences, locations, themes, even characters. And for everything you cut out, you piss the hardcore fans of more and more.
The key to making a successful adaptation is striking the right balance between the fans and the mainstream, which is about as easy as destroying a main battle tank with a tennis ball.
So if you think there's some other key element to the dilemma of adaptation quality, post a reply and see what comes up.
Of course there are exceptions, but the rule usually stays in place because an adaptation has a core problem: you have to appeal to two very different audiences. This raises a serious problem - these audiences want different things.
The first audience are the hardcore fans, the ones that made the adaptation so popular that someone thought it would be a good idea to make some serious cash out of it. These hardcore fans will be expecting nothing but a verbatim pixel-by-pixel recreation, just with addition or removal of interactivity. For example, if you're a fan of the Half-Life series, you'd want want the(hypothetical) movie adaptation to have pretty much everything in it that was in the gane, the same lines, the Combine look the same, the people to look the same, etc. You wouldn't wont anything taken out, and you would be angry if they did.
The second audience is the mainstream consumer, the non-fans that are just looking for something to entertain them. They outnumber the hardcore fans substantially. They don't want a recreation of the original product, because the original product isn't as acessible to them. Imagine someone who has never played a Metal Gear game watching a movie adaptation of an MGS game. Their face would go blank whenever something wasn't exploding and they wouldn't GET the movie and as a result dislike it.
This is the core of the problem. If you're making an adaptation, you have to appeal to BOTH audiences, the hardcore and the mainstream. These two species don't often coexist peacefully. Most games are around ten to twenty hours long (a lot are much longer ie. Final Fantasy). A movie can't be longer than three hours, especially if you want it to market it to the mainstream consumer - fourteen-to-twenty-year-olds - who have short attention spans. So you have to cut things out - sequences, locations, themes, even characters. And for everything you cut out, you piss the hardcore fans of more and more.
The key to making a successful adaptation is striking the right balance between the fans and the mainstream, which is about as easy as destroying a main battle tank with a tennis ball.
So if you think there's some other key element to the dilemma of adaptation quality, post a reply and see what comes up.
