All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (31 page)

When Gore Verbinski, the director of the billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean series, got hold of the movie rights for BioShock, he began to talk to his coworkers and friends. He said, “I want to make this movie so scary, so creepy, that kids will tell their friends, ‘Don’t go see that movie. It’s too scary.’ ” Verbinski wanted to do the film so badly that he decided against doing the fourth iteration of
Pirates
. John Logan, who wrote the scripts for
Sweeney Todd, Gladiator
, and
Star Trek: Nemesis
, had worked out a script that was true to the terrifying nature of Ken Levine’s baby. But when the budget ballooned to $160 million, Universal Pictures balked, suggesting that the movie be shot outside the United States in order to cut costs. Unable to create his detailed, graphically moody vision of Rapture, Verbinski put the project on a long-term hold to work on another Logan screenplay, this time
an animated movie called
Rango
, starring the voice of the director’s favorite lead, Johnny Depp. Had Verbinski directed the BioShock film, it likely would have been the first significant videogame adaptation to find its way to theaters.

Studios also hesitated and ultimately passed on an adaptation for the landmark shooter Halo, which was at first reported to have Denzel Washington as its star, an odd choice. Microsoft resold to Universal for $10 million a screenplay it paid Alex Garland $1 million to pen. That inflated fee certainly annoyed the high-powered executives in Hollywood. But Universal’s and Fox’s decision to pull the plug was also likely due to the director Peter Jackson’s box office failure with the 2005 remake of
King Kong
. Had Jackson had a mega-hit with the oversized gorilla, Halo would have in all likelihood been made and might have been the first important videogame-to-movie adaptation.

There has never been a standout movie, one with a compelling plot and A-list acting, made from a videogame. Compared to the best action movies from the world of comics, such as
The Dark Knight
or
Spider-Man
, videogame movies have sucked. The question always has been, Whose fault is it? Is it the gaming companies, whose technology nerds don’t understand the linear nature of movie storytelling? Take the sad Final Fantasy movie. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the mastermind behind the games, muscled his way into the moviemaking process with a story of his own making. He also fussed with the screenwriters’ interpretation of his story. The series of Final Fantasy role playing games is often brilliant, but difficult to comprehend story-wise. Sakaguchi could have created a compelling treatment that was a tasty bite from the universe where good fights evil, and where a character named Cid seems to morph into someone different with each release. Instead, he authored a story that was as hard to follow as a cockroach in a dark room. While
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
had perfect-looking animated characters, thanks to
meticulously detailed CGI animation, reviews like Kenneth Turan’s in the
Los Angeles Times
were typical: “The sight of these characters getting romantic is about as involving as watching two expensive mannequins kissing in a Macy’s window.”

Or should the blame be placed on the movie companies, whose executives are only in it for the synergy of branding, trying to cash in on the latest trend?

It may be that videogames are already their own movies. Forget for a while the movielike scenes between play that make games feel like they possess a linear narrative inspired by film. Each videogame is a twenty-to-one-hundred-hour experience, often one that inveigles the mind. In the end, the experience is affecting, almost the way an intimate human relationship is affecting. As you go to sleep, your mind muses upon the time spent with the characters and environments beyond the game play. In the best videogames, the interactivity, the movement forward through forests or space or a post-apocalyptic nightmare, makes you the protagonist too. Constructing a movie from BioShock can almost be seen as making a movie of your own life. Jack didn’t seem like that when
you
played him. In fact, you might think that Jack wouldn’t do such a thing because you yourself wouldn’t do such a thing. How could a movie ever live up to that experience? In that way, movies based on games have their work cut out for them, even more than those based on books. Beyond the long immersion, a fan’s first encounter with a work becomes a gold standard, and all other incarnations often suffer in comparison. When games are the first medium, movies
really
suffer by comparison. That also can apply when movies are turned into games. The games are rarely as engrossing as the movie, because you already have a preconceived notion of what the movie is.

It’s not as if filmmakers haven’t at least feigned concern for doing things right. Sam Raimi, the horror movie auteur who became the Spider-Man series director, was a ravenous player of World
of Warcraft with his son, so much so that he signed on to direct a film version of the massively multiplayer online role playing game. Many WoW gamers believe it’s impossible for any film to live up to their videogame standard, simply because the World of Warcraft story branches out in so many directions and has so many characters and side quests. The mythic story of Sylvanas Windrunner’s hate for Arthas could be a movie in itself. Sylvanas was the tough Ranger-General of Silvermoon, a sylphlike beauty who was turned into a banshee by Arthas. She was also a military genius on par with George Patton. The tale of Arthas Menethil, even before he becomes the Lich King, is even more complex and wide-ranging, so much so that it was the subject of a hardcover tome. And the story of the Lich King’s reign is full of more twists and turns than the novel about Arthas. So it may be that the Warcraft movie is an undertaking of infinite proportions, a black hole of tale upon tale upon tale. People who know Raimi have said that, while he appreciates and likes the Warcraft ethos, he is mainly engaged because of the bonding he has had with his son during game play sessions, and not because the game cries out, “There’s a movie in here,” or even a “series of movies.” And can Raimi raise the nearly $200 million he would need to do Warcraft at least some semblance of justice? After being taken off of the Spider-Man series because Sony wanted to cut his budget and he refused to do so, it remains to be seen whether Raimi has the clout to do such a sprawling movie.

Blizzard itself had a certain level of nervousness about what a movie would do to the integrity of the game as a whole. Without a healthy World of Warcraft, Activision/Blizzard would see its stock plummet. Chris Metzen, who himself reached out to Raimi in November 2008, was stoked about the director’s potential involvement. Raimi had succeeded three times over with a complicated license that, like World of Warcraft, had rabid, critical fans. While he was sensitive to the demands of the fans, he still made the movies his
own. When Metzen talked with Raimi, he felt immediately that the director was ready to tackle something on the great scale of World of Warcraft, which has nine separate cultures that are in constant hostile confrontation against one another.

“I don’t want to trip you up with story conversations this early. But what would you do with World of Warcraft?” asked Metzen.

Raimi, who actually did play a lot of WoW and worked on a character to an impressive Level 72, knew that there were as many as one hundred different linear stories in the MMO. Trying to tackle them all would be an exercise in madness. “I think it’s about theme first,” replied Raimi. “It’s about why war is so unceasing in this unique world. Why do these cultures keep on fighting? What is it about their nature that never lets them live in peace? And what common values do these characters share with the people who will watch this film?”

Metzen left the meeting sure that Raimi was the perfect person to helm the World of Warcraft movie. Raimi was on board and Blizzard was thrilled. And yet the question remained: Even if the money could be raised for the film, and even if the film was expertly shot and edited, would discriminating WoW fans feel the final product was genuine?

Steven Spielberg, an avid gamer who loved the classic The Syndicate, and who was so juiced about games that he let Dream-Works Interactive produce a dozen PC games for five years in the 1990s, including three middling reimaginings of
Jurassic Park
, never saw fit to take a videogame to the big screen. Spielberg’s friend John Milius, the jocular
Apocalypse Now
screenwriter, also worked on one of Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor games. While he enjoyed the experience, even as the game was being released he shook his head and said that videogames do graphics well, but they don’t do story well. He indicated that Spielberg felt the same way. If Spielberg won’t touch videogames because of what’s seen as their inherent lack
of story, the future of videogames as box office victories isn’t bright. It’s a genre full of poorly made movies, like the Milla Jovovich series
Resident Evil
. Resident Evil, the game franchise, is a series in which your very soul seems possessed by its zombies and general tenor of impending doom. The movies, on the other hand, are predictable and poorly acted. And you can say the same thing about every movie made from a videogame.

If you were to drive the circuitous roads high up into the Hollywood Hills, where the wealthier folk reside, you’d come across a fancy but somewhat hidden abode. Inside, children would be playing videogames. Outside, you’d sit on an expensive chaise lounge at a lavish Labor Day barbecue. The glamorous home overlooking Los Angeles belongs to the most significant maker of television movies in the world. He made Brad Pitt into a movie star, and he discovered Hilary Swank as well. As the smell of grilling burgers and chicken wafted through the unusually clean air, the producer would walk over to an area far from the pool, the only place the many children could not get to with their water blaster guns. The producer, who is whip smart and affable as a host but tough and savvy as a businessman, would sit down nearby. He would look out over downtown Los Angeles and then look you straight in the eye, asking, “Did videogames really earn more money than movies last year?”

If you knew a little bit about videogames, you would nod enthusiastically and say, “And they’re going to make more money this year. Some of the games cost upward of twenty-five million dollars to make. Sometimes they sell, like, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of games.”

The producer would shake his head, unbelieving, and there would be just the merest hint of fear in his eyes. He would look over to his young son, who is blasting with water as many young girls as he can find at the party and who, like every son there, cares more about games than movies. “I could make four TV movies for
twenty-five million dollars.” And as you listened, you would think, “Nice, but they wouldn’t take you on the same trip to the same places that just one videogame would.” He would shake his head again, get up, and walk off, returning to tend the food on the barbecue. Maybe, just for a moment while he was shaking his head, he believed he was in the wrong business.

But perhaps television is where some of the videogames should go, to become TV movies at HBO or Showtime. If executives kept the budgets and expectations low, hired an up-and-coming director with heart and knowledge of the industry, one who worked hard and carefully, then a success might well come seemingly out of nowhere. Then again, if one, just one, of the videogame movies in theaters became a blockbuster, the lemminglike producers in Hollywood would fall over themselves to imitate that success. And some, the conscientious ones, would even try to do better than make money. They might try to make a movie that meant something beyond action; they might try to make a movie that was memorable beyond the genre. You can dream, can’t you?

They were nerds, but nerds of a different stripe, the kind that often felt severely out of place, even among other outcasts. The Houser brothers were not computer geeks. They didn’t code games in their bedrooms in their spare time. They weren’t geniuses of math or whizzes of computer science. They didn’t want to take apart a game to see how and why the code worked. And they would grow up to become outsiders in a business full of computer whizzes and egotistical suits.