Over time, tons of motion pictures have been licensed for a video game iteration. Unfortunately, no matter how good the movie, and even when the premise fits perfectly, games based on films tend to all suck. Or at least most of them.

The best known anecdote about a movie made into game is one that industry insiders have heard as often as their grandfather’s WWII tale… The year was 1982, Atari was on a roll, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. had just blown up the box office.

Steve Ross, CEO of Atari's parent company Warner Communications, entered talks with Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures. A long time got wasted negotiating the right amount to be paid for the rights (reportedly something between 20 and 25 millions US$). By July, when the contract was finally inked, less than six weeks remained in order to meet the September 1 deadline necessary to ship in time for Christmas shopping season.

Howard Scott Warshaw, a quite skilled programmer at the time, did a hectic job trying to code some software that works (as in "bug free"), but unsurprisingly, the final game was born a stinker. It was really one of the most boring ever made, with nearly no action going on at all. Atari realized that but still assumed that on the license alone, it would hit the jackpot anyway. Wrongo. The street vibe killed the game, the product tanked like sun protector in the north pole, selling through only about 15% of the initial production lot.

The legend has it that the company had to bury all the carts in a New Mexican dump after writing them off. It may sound too ironically tasty to be true, when you know that the goal of the game is to fall into holes looking for phone pieces to assemble so that E.T. can return home... But several Ataristorians still back the rumor as being founded to this day. Anyhow, stuff like that never gets old... I'll probably feed the story to my grandkids with their soup in 20-30 years from now, while rambling about the fact that there was a time when songs and movies were sold on discs. 

You’d think this is the kind of lesson you don’t need to learn twice. Yet, thirty years later, the moral of the story –quality matters more than ship date and fancy title- seems to have still not entered the mind of many (most?) corporate execs on both sides of the aisle. Or if I may put it bluntly: Hollywood just doesn’t get it, while game producers cave in like cowards more often than not. If the latter would grow a pair, and the former open its minds, this is what they’d talk about in their next face to face meetings… 

The Ship Date Drama 

If you’re wondering why all movie-based games are subpar, the core of the matter lies here. It is a common belief that if a game based on a movie ships on the same day set for theatre launch of said motion picture, it will automatically sell more copies. It is therefore stipulated in many licensing contracts that the product must hit the retailers on the right streetdate, no matter what.

Since the contract is signed only some months (or at utmost a year) before the movie is published, your time window to make the build is quite short. Too short. So, usually, when a publisher enters such a deal, it dusts one of its outdated engines off and plugs some graphical and plot elements in the mix to tailor the game as something that looks and smells fresh. It tries to obtain as much material from the movie studio in the process, then rushes out the polishing and beta-testing phases to be on time with the fixed schedule. The game that comes to store shelves is either average or awfully bad, but the license appeal should help out reach break even or in best case scenario make some profit. No matter how great a movie is, the game based on it is rarely at level. No matter how strong a title is, when turned into a game, it very seldomly reaches the same sales level as the ones achieved by the blockbuster in the theaters. 

Look at the recent Wall-E non-event (I could have taken Ratatouille from last year to make my point just the same). Disney Pixar spits out. an edgy movie with impressive looks and a robot as central protagonist. Even better, it's a blockbuster hit. You'd think the game would fare well. Or at least if you're a corporate analyst with no hardcore gaming friend to correct you, that's what you'd think. Most gamers lost hope at the minute the game appeared on the release calendars. When it eventually came out, it didn't surprise any of them (and these guys are counted in dozens of millions, that's a lot of people to fail to surprise) that the game reviewed poorly and was essentially a piece of greedware that's not worth spending any thought on. Only a few parents will be fooled at the exit of the theatre, but they are not all dumb and they will learn one day that the 9.95 dollar action figure lasts about as long as the crappy licensed game that costs 4 or 5 times that.  

I'll now say something bold that most gaming industry insiders and savvy observers are silently convinced of: Wall-E would have sold better if it had been released in November, fine-tuned and with a meta-ranking placing it among the good games of Christmas. Because you see, moviegoers are not as brainless as you think. Comes Black Friday, they still remember what they loved last summer. Plus, thinking long tail, like Nintendo always does, or "slow burner" to put it in feature film jargon, a really strong title can keep selling through word of mouth or price drops later down the marketing cycle too, when the movie launches on DVD and on subscriptions TV for instance.

One thing is for sure, compared to a lame game about a famous robot, a great game about the same robot with stunning visuals will attract way more gamers (and again that's millions you're tapping into; I didn't use any strange epithet such as "core" or "casual" in front of the word "gamers". I just said gamers. That is... the largest share of the market. Parents and uneducated gift buyers are no longer what they used to be when it comes to the bulk of entertainment purchases).  It’s impossible to make an awesome AAA-game about a movie and have it ship on time. No matter how hard you try. Ask David Perry. On the other hand, it doesn't matter too much to postpone a game if it's to make it better. Gamers are used to wait patiently anyway. It goes with the nature of the craft. The process. If you don't get that, you shouldn't be paid analyzing or making decisions within this industry really. However, in the logistics sector I hear, they are looking for people with strong scheduling skills. 

To some extent, one could say we repeat the E.T. crash again and again, except in the meantime, game companies such as THQ have specialized themselves so much in performing this repetitive stunt that they found ways to minimize the damage and actually turn out a buck on some of such operations. Not as much as when a pure gaming IP breaks into a hit franchise, but still something. Enough to keep the practice going. Forever and ever...? 

Kung Fu Panda, the Dreamworks movie tailored for consoles by Activision, was relying on a better engine and reviewed a bit better. But the premise of the movie and its success seem to have Acti convinced that polishing things further may bring improved results along the way... They are now planning a sequel that has nothing to do with the movie and whose release will not coincide with any hollywood event whatsoever. They're thinking franchise. Expect the quality of the next Kung Fu Panda game to be improved upon a lot. I'm daring this statement without having seen anything about the game yet. It's just common sense. Good things need time. 

Cause that's the point: a good game takes time to brew. Arguably more time than a movie, no matter how harsh it is to swallow that fact on the other side of the hill. Plus, the rights on a movie are usually traded when the said movie is already well in production. So, the bunny starts the race before the turtle, making things even less fair. If you know that sometimes movie studios are even reluctant to share their material with the studio working on the game (for fear of… well, many things… creative circles have many valid reasons to be paranoid nowadays), you start getting the picture. Usually, by the time the game hits the decks, critique is negative and word of mouth too. Sales are low. Worse comes to worst, gamers who have been around for more than a year, know by experience or from a friend that movie games are always bad anyway and that noone should ever bother to buy one. When you think about it, that’s quite a bad reputation to have, a tough one to shake, and definitely one that hinders the global potential of the business practice. As in, movie licenses may sell well as games, but they could sell sooo much better. 

The exceptions that prove the rule... is flawed 

If you ask veteran gamers about great games based on movies, I betcha the following three names will come up recurringly: Robocop, Die Hard Trilogy, GoldenEye. All three have one thing in common: they were planned as games, far away from movie studio influence and long after the movie was already out actually. Robocop was based on the Paul Verhoven movie from 1987 but hit the arcades only one year later in '88. It was published by Data East and developed by UK based Ocean Software. Since it was meant to be a coin-op machine, it couldn't suck. Cause you can trick me once, but you're not gonna trick me twice. So, you may shell to me a bad game on a disc for 60 bucks, yeah it could happen. But if I put a coin in a game that doesn't give me pleasure, I don't put in a second coin. So, quality did matter much more than in the cases studied above. Also developed without time constraints, it turned out to be a great action game with a premise that suits it well. It became a smash hit in the dark rooms and eventually was ported on every contemporary home system, driving some interesting figures on Gameboy and Commodore computers for example. I personally remember it as the first movie game that really broke the mould. Feel free to spank me in the comments section if I am chronologically wrong.

"In just three months, Die Hard Trilogy for PlayStation has shipped more than 500,000 units worldwide and is being touted by gamers and critics as one of the greatest movie-inspired video games of all time - topping charts everywhere. " said the Fox Interactive press release to announce the game was being ported to Sega Saturn and PC. "Yippie-kiyay, motherfucker." I would have added in the footnote. Based on the famous Bruce Willis stints, Die Hard, Die Harder and Die Hard with a Vengeance, -but not using the actor's image neither on the box nor in-game for un-related contractual reasons- the disc delivered three full games. A third-person action adventure, a rail-shooter and a car game [in which blood regularly spilled all over your windshield] that all stood alone neatly. Since the movies were out for a long while (1988, 1990, 1995), the 1996 game developed by Probe didn't have to bother about ship dates of any kind. It was relying on a legacy and it tried to do it justice, taking from the movies the ingredients that made sense for a game recipe. Then taking their time to cook it. Not only am I one of those who bought the game, but I personally hold it in my top 10 best memories on PlayStation. 

Then, one day, GoldenEye came and opened our eyes for good. Based on a James Bond movie released in 1995, and if anything not the most timelessly memorable of them all, the Nintendo64 exclusive game that Rare put together for Big N came out no less than three years later in 1998. Anybody with a few neurons left can tell you that if the game had been bad, it would not have sold more than half a million copies if released along that particular movie. The brand appeal of it was not very strong back then. Three years later, a bad game about that film would have tanked like a snowboard in Africa. But, see, the game happened to be great. So, naturally, through word of mouth, it became an iconic system seller for the machine, racking up 8 millions cartridges in global sales. GoldenEye entered the pantheon of cult games that some of us still play a decade later, be it in its original form or through emulation. Now let me place a wager with the businessmen reading these lines: name me one game based on a movie that sold more copies on a single platform and you'll win yourself a kiss. Quality does matter more than ship date. I rest my case. 

The Strongarm 

If it’s as simple and obvious as I explain in the paragraph above, then why is it so? How did we get there? Well, you see, it may be easy for me to look at the matter with perspective from my sofa... But when insiders, from one or the other industry, are actually negotiating movie licenses for real, they are usually biased about a couple of things, being for their corporate culture or because of the stakes at hand. 

Most movie execs tend to look at video games with condescendence. Movies are the big deal. DVD sales and TV broadcasting are the main additional revenue streams. International distribution is of high importance. Internet downloads may be the future. The rest is just merchandising. Toys, hats, candies, clothes, promotional items, accessories and… video games are just a marketing side product that helps building awareness while bringing in a bit cash in form of licensing fees. Irrelevant. The Xbox disc is about the same to them as the colored pen they’ll give away by the truckload. As a licensee, you sign here and follow their guideline rules, requirements lists and templates or you get out the room. They don’t have much time to negotiate with you about your subproduct no matter how large their fake smile is when they tell you to your face that they “value your business a lot”. 

Sure, I caricature it a bit to an extreme. But it’s only to make the big picture crytal clear. In the end, sadly enough, I’m quite close from how it plays out in real life anyway. Problem with that being: a game is not a toy. It takes more resources and man-hours to craft and refine. 

You would think that this is a thing from the past, that I’m talking about the days the gaming industry was too small to sit down with the jaded big wigs who know it all. You’d think nowadays, with both industries bringing in the same kind of annual revenues and being of equivalent sizes, talks would be smoother. But the reality is quite different. If movie people are quick to steal ideas from video games because they want to get inspiration from their astonishing success, their arrogance and smugness make it difficult to accept the fellow media as equal. If anything, the success of video games makes them more defensive about their own thing, more narrow-minded. Like when dealing with insecure teenagers who have something to prove, it became some sort of a “mine is bigger than yours” contest now. Sure, some bonkable actors, like Vin Diesel (Wheelman) or Bruce Willis (Apocalypse), and some high profile directors, like Steven Spielberg (Medal of Honor, Boom Blox) or Peter Jackson (secretly working on something for Microsoft), have understood the potential of the gaming medium. But that doesn’t mean the numerous suit’n’ties types who decide things in Hollywood get it too. It’s the tree that hides the forest if you will. At the end of the day, the typical Hollywood exec still sees and wants to see the video game as a product of a lesser importance than the movie itself. He finds proof of that in the fact that video games made about his movies all underperform, overlooking the fact that this is because of the ship date demand coming from his side in the first place – the snake eats its tail.  

It’s a shame, when you think about how much games and movies could to give each other both as art forms and businesses if they cared to be a bit friendlier and open with one another. Many, really many, game publishers know it shouldn’t be this way. But the problem for them is leverage. As long as a couple of top-5 publishers accept the deals as is, there is no way for the video games industry to take on Hollywood as a whole and negotiate change as an homogenous body. You do movie games like Hollywood tells you to or you don’t do movie games at all, letting your neighbor pick up the slack. Sure, many developers try to go the extra mile and come up with a new trick to defeat the curse and have a great game ship on time. But it never truly happens. Yet, nobody ever cares to raise their hand and renegotiate the ship date issue altogether. The law of silence is in place because ratting out might cut you out of the loop. Game companies accommodate themselves buying licenses even if that involves adjusting to a production model that they know is flawed. 

Let’s face it, so far, top-tier video game publishers see themselves primarily as competitors. So, when a hot movie license is up for grabs, it is their natural inclination to cut each other's throats for it. So, if EA or Acti reject an offer, THQ or Ubi are likely to snatch the deal by accepting the terms of the movie licensor.  That will always be true until the top-10 publishers all realize that they have a common interest in this case. Like in the crusade against piracy (which they fight as a united front), Hollywood will never bend unless faced together as a block. I’m not talking violating anti-trust rules and such. It’s not about price fixing anyway. It’s about pride fixing. It’s about establishing a set of common rules, though some public document listing the video games industry requirements or whatever, with all the big 10 as co-signees. If these requirements are not met by movie majors, a game based on their movies will not be made and that’s the end of it. The "video game publishers strike" so to speak. The key rules would be about: more latitude for the ship date issue or even obtaining final cut for the game maker on that topic, priority on quality insurances, rules about sharing confidential material that can help make the game better etc. Aretha Franklin would sum it all up in one word: RESPECT. Respect the video game makers to make the video game decisions; you'll end up cashing in more royalty money. 

The Way of the Samurai 

In Japan, video games are more deeply intricated in the pop culture. Therefore, several creators approach it, for decades already, as just one of many media. Icons like Mamoru Oshii and his buddy Shirow, to name just one example, often develop their universes across books, movies, animes, mangas and, indeed, video games. Series like .Hack, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, Final Fantasy or to a more commercial extent, Dragonball Z, Naruto and Bleach are available in any entertainment form you can think of, in ways that compliment each other, growing further their aura throughout Japanese society.  

This Japanese way of meta-entertainment has been tried in the west. The Wachowsky brothers and their recent attempt at doing so with the Matrix is the most emblematic case. See, before becoming hollywood big shots, they had studied in Japan, under the wing of none other than sensei Mamoru Oshii. So, as much as Ghost in the Shell and Avalon, from the latter author, have inspired the scenario of the Matrix saga, as much as one can't help but find inspiration from Tekken or Dragonball Z in the fighting scenes of the trilogy, it's also in their ubiquituous media approach that the two siblings showed what they learned during their Japanese experience. One weapon in their arsenal was meant to be the ambitious game "Enter the Matrix". The game was designed to be a side story to the second and third movies, revealing some hidden plot elements and letting you enjoy what it is like to be within the matrix yourself... Western minded in their marketing approach though, they couldn't drop the idea that the game has to ship alongside a theatrical release. But they knew it was a tough task, that there was a curse to beat. So they appointed David Perry, a legendary game designer, with an army of coders of his own choice, threw tons of money at him, and opened the doors to the production sets and backrooms so that David could get as much as he needed. Mr. Perry tried his best with the time he had, but despite the monstruous resources made available to him and his team, the title came out with a flawed gameplay interface, looked unfinished and imperfect, didn't meet expectations neither in reviews nor sales. Compared to internal hopes (check David Perry's interviews from around that era about the level of quality he wants to achieve, check EA sales forecasts etc.), one could say it completely tanked. It flopped. Would we have been in Japan, if the game is not ready, it's postponed, no matter what kind of symbolique you may find in a specific ship date. That is exactly what the Wachowsky brothers and EA had to learn from the Matrix lesson. Maybe today came the time at last to make another Matrix game or a V for Vendetta project with the right timeline for the development cycle of it? Just thinking out loud... Judging from the way Speed Racer has been handled in partnership with THQ, I may be setting my hopes too high. Some people never learn. 

One man who does get it is George Lucas. In fact, the man didn't even need to travel to Japan or wait to get past the eighties to get it. Star Wars to some extent is the perfect transposition of the Japanese art&business model when it comes to universes creation. It started as a trilogy, it eventually became a sixology, not counting side episodes and remakes. But in the middle, 20 years have been filled with dozens and dozens of Star Wars games, all bringing something new to the saga, selling tremendously well, and meeting fans' expectations in terms of quality. The thing is Lucas was not just a visionary when it comes to story-telling for the big screen or special effects. He also shaped up movie merchandising when it comes to toys... And he finally had the brilliant idea to start his own Lucasfilm Games (later renamed LucasArts) studio as early as in 1982. He saw right during the NES and Atari days that games inspired by strong movie licenses, expanding their universe and developed with quality in mind, would have great potential. He took the opposite road as everybody else at the time, and brought it home. Since the 8-bits games to the Lego saga and the Light Saber Wii sessions coming this Christmas, passing through the Super episodes on SuperNES, Shadow of the Empire 64, Battlefront, Rogue Squadron and the brilliantly twisted Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars has become, through time, as much as a video games icon as it is a movie franchise. And it made George Lucas even richer in the process.  

Bleeding Edge 

The attempts and opportunities at making things better do exist. Electronic Arts for example seems to try to establish the Lord of the Rings of Tolkien/Jackson fame as a true franchise. Or better put, they're trying to pull a Lucas on this one. It explores the universe through various genres and quality games designed by some of its best in-house studios. EA also has been enjoying good success with the Harry Potter series, improving engines and visuals sequel after sequel, something the long-lasting Rowlands series for sure allows.  

Another additional direction that EA is now heading, again thinking franchises rather than one-shots, is the back catalog, learning from the Die Hard and GoldenEye examples mentioned above. Hollywood classics come with some great advantages compared to new productions. First of all, you don't need to wait until summer to see if it will hit or not. You already know which movie is a classic that keeps selling steadily on DVDs a decade after its original release and which one got out of collective memory quickly. It's easier to gauge the timelessness of a piece after time has actually gone by already. You can measure the fanbase so to speak. And, more importantly, you get out of the short-development cycle against theatrical release date dilemma. No time constraints. More time to think. More time to breathe. More time to write some code and beta-test the shit out of it. The Godfather was a step in that direction. Sure, it triggered quite a bit of fuss, the director Francis Ford Coppola not being particularly keen seeing his masterpiece turned into a violent repetitive FPS, and even less keen on not getting properly compensated by Paramount for the port. Sure, the game could have been better somehow. But an innovative and ambitious "The Godfather II" opus is coming out this Christmas to correct the shot on the nextgen systems, and I'd recommend you to keep a close eye on this one.  

EA is not the only publisher eyeing the classics opportunities. Vivendi Games also came out with a Scarface licensed game near the end of the previous generation cycle. Sierra is working on Ghostbusters as of late. Here is thinking we won't have to wait much longer to see some of Hollywood's dearest properties appear or return in video game form without calendar coincidence of any theatrical release whatsoever: from Peter Pan to Terminator, without omitting Mad Max, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Alamo, Independence Day, 5th Element, Rush Hour, Transporter, Bad Boys, Face Off, Top Gun, Back to the Future, Aliens, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Speed, Backdraft, Lethal Weapon, Matrix, Rocky, Rambo, Aladdin, all of which having high-concept premises and universes that would transpose well into modern video game franchises, across multiple genres for many. Some of these would actually make better games than movies in my opinion. Also, whose to say a game about The Dark Knight or I am Legend (lukewarm reception as a movie for sure but what a great premise for a video game) wouldn't sell better now than they would have if rushed out six months ago. 

Other opportunities of licenses with strong content yet without time constraints could come from the TV series renaissance. UbiSoft seems to be on this one, already publishing games about CSI, Heroes and Lost. Other publishers have released games about The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives too. I am personally thinking though that these properties would be better fit to start up the episodic content model that we hear talking about so much going deeper into the digital age. I mean, how can you make a game with an arc about a story without end? Therefore, why not sell the engine as a disc then deliver downloadable content every month, using the new twists, episode plots, characters reveals, cliffhangers and all these techniques that keep the audience hooked. The properties mentioned above for sure fits such a theoretical model, same as would other shows like The Shield, Prison Break, Burn Notice, Breaking Bad, Smallville, Supernatural or even ER on Wii, judging by the sales numbers of Atlus' Trauma Center around the world. Or going the back catalog road, what about the A-Team? Didn't its characters cast look videogame-ish enough already before there were video games? 

On the long run, both the movie and gaming industries are pre-destined to work closer together in synergy. On one side, you see that majors like Disney or Universal are slowly realizing the importance of games. The latter has just recently announced its intentions to start-down a publishing arm in charge of managing its catalog of properties in the gaming world. The former is slowly but surely expanding its media empire in that direction, what with the High School stuff or that Pure off-road game from recently acquired Black Rock Studio. Sure, Disney is not yet a grand game publisher. But it's gonna get there, be it by slowly building and learning internally, or by one morning just acquiring UbiSoft outright. It's not like Yves Guillemot (CEO of the French based firm) has not been vocal over the past couple of years about his position that he would either sell to a multimedia conglomerate or stay independent (when asked in the French economical press about why he was so reluctant selling out to EA). UbiSoft by the way, has also made clear its ambition to diversify its multimedia activities. Books, movies, imagery, games, whatever is available. The recent acquisitions of the Tom Clancy rights and Hybride Technologies(studio responsible for the special effects in Sin City and 300), their development of some cross-over tools for the future,  the way they partner with somebody like James Cameron on Avalon; all these are signs that Ubi doesn't just talk the talk but walks the walk too.  EA and Capcom (who wants to "do with games what Marvel pulled with comics") are also attracted by the Hollywood sirens in some measure. In Japan, Square Enix even went the extra mile by producing in-house its own CGI Final Fantasy movies (Spirit Within and Advent Children). Fact is both these markets can help, borrom and learn from each other. Not just from a technological point of view. Also from an artistic point of view, because good content is good content, and great premises can be used in many different variants and there are many ways to tell a great story. Finally, both can fuel each other's growth by being more cooperative on the business level of things too. Mergers and acquisitions across the board, cooperation deals, open minded negociations about scheduling, all this is deemed to happen. Better sooner than later then. We've been waiting for 30 years. It's not like all industries are incapable of working together to serve each other: music is omnipresent in contemporary films and video game productions, milking constant revenue streams from both these cash cows in all ways imaginable to man. If it's really all just a money game in the end, then you should keep your minds open to the new creative ways of printing notes. Give us top-notch games inspired by powerful movies; we'll gratefully pay you shit tons for it in return.