I personally think Dino Crysis is Resident Evil with Dinossaurs. But then, I think I liked the Silent Hill movie, not a bad one in this case...

well id say that NOTHING is likely to be good. The odds of buying a GOOD game, movie, or novel with no prior knowledge of it, is probably less than 5%.

As far as videogame based movies being more likely to be bad. I doubt it has anything to do with the story in the original game, and more about the type of movie directors/producers etc who are attracted to a videogame movie deal.

I've got a bigger surprise for you: games based on movies aren't likely to be any good either, mainly because there is too much pre-existing story that acts as a roadblock to what a strong gaming-narrative demands (which is a lot of open possibilities, and interpretability).

And I think your absolutely right about games being a poor storytelling medium, but that doesn't mean that they can't be a strong narrative medium. The most significant gaming narratives, in my opinion, are those that take place outside of a traditional arc-shaped storyline.

One more thing, I heard that some folks are doing a movie for Shadow of the Colossus. I was thinking that this could be really good, but the only way to do it right is to do the whole thing with no dialogue. Just a full orchestral score, horse riding, thuderstorms, crashing waves, etc.

(and giant battles, of course)

Obviously not every game story would translate well into a movie. It depends on the game. The basic characters and plot and even some of the set pieces could be moved over, but game stories are structured very differently than film stories. So rewriting and restructuring and reconceiving would always be necessary.

Most movies based on games completely leave the story from the game behind. This can often be a mistake. The characters and plot that made the story for the game compelling is totally dumped, so the producers are basically starting from scratch. The only thing similar sometimes is the title.

But the new Batman Arkham Asylum game would make for a great movie if restructured to fit that medium. Same with Infamous. Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Metal Gear Solid. What's needed are interesting, dimensional characters and some semblance of a three act structure. If that's present in the game story, then there's no reason it can't translate into a film.

The problem with this article is a lack of consideration given how the sausage making process works in hollywood, and actually studying the case files of failed video game movie adaptations. I hate to be glib but it really comes down to the fact that hollywood excecutives would rather have any IP look and feel like a standard generic product. Just to be safer with so much money being invested. The unfortunate consequence is that the same movie gets made over and over again. For example look at Aeon Flux and Resident Evil.(yea I know AF isn't a game IP, but it's close enough to prove the point.) And most other video game adaptations as of late belong to Uwe Boll, a terrible and prolific filmmaker/opportunist.
The problems with video game adaptations is that the video game medium isn't mature enough, meaning there very few if any successful filmmakers who love video games as a storytelling medium. Comic Books have achieved some level of maturity regarding that point, just take a look at Sam Raimy.
Case in point regarding failed VG movies. Street Fighter (1994) was an excuse for the director to remake Guns of Navarrone(his favorite movie) to the best of his ability given the IP. No regard was given to the look and feel and most important tone of the video game. The recent adaption is even worse. 300 should have been used as a template for style and tone and not some every other generic thriller.
I feel the video game medium can surpass film as a story telling medium, given time and enough professional maturation in the field. But thats besides the point.

"While we're finally getting some excellent movies deriving from comics--it's taken a *long* time--we're much less likely to get very good movies deriving from video games."

Nah it'll also just take a *long* time

"In essence you have to make up the story for the movie because there isn't much of one in the game--the game is more a setting than a story."

Now this is interesting as it are the settings/world of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter or Pokemon that make them grand. Those can be books, movies, video games, toys, card games, etc.

Then it's... o wait! Pokemon started as a game (I just figure as I type this)

...but then again, the movies from pokemon weren't the best of the franchise. (or did they do well?)

But as I wanted to say, then it's only waiting until there's a game with a setting/world that does lead itself to transmedium adaption, including movies

I think the best you could hope for in a video game movie is a decent to good action flick. You would need a production crew that had a passion for games, and maybe some talent for making movies. I am a big Halo fan, and I always was disappointed that the live action movie hasn't came to be. I thought it be like a new Starship Troopers.

Hollywood Execs, like the Execs in our own industry, have run out of ideas and are always trying to capitalize on the intellectual property of their youth, whether they are old cartoons, comic books or video games. The flow goes both ways, video games based on movies and vice-verse. From a marketing perspective, there's a nostalgia and name recognition factor that in theory helps ensure a more successful title. But IMHO, the Execs are just grown up kids trying to recreate their youth.

Stories in video games are usually shallow. Good stories have depth, where the changes don't just happen in the world, they happen inside the characters. That's hard to dramatize in a video game where the focus is on the environment and conflict with other characters. Games tend to have shallow heroes who aren't faced with any kind of moral dilemma or internal conflict.

But that's not true with ALL games. Some would probably make a good movie. Case in point - BioShock dramatized a moral dilemma with the collection of "Adam". The player had to make decision to spare the girl or kill her for immediate gain. It exposed his humanity and made you feel much more emotionally connected to the hero which is really important for a movie. Compare this to Halo for example. At what point is Master Chief's humanity revealed? The game almost goes out of its way to hide his humanity by putting a faceplate on him, making it harder to be emotionally connected to him. His conflict is completely external. It's no wonder that Peter Jackson chose to do Precinct 9 over a Halo movie, because Precinct 9 tells a real story and really drills into moral issues and questions our very definition of humanity by having the hero change sides and fight for the aliens. Master Chief would never do that. He's one-dimensional.

There is more to Halo then the Master Chief. ;) I think it would be pretty easy to make a decent sci-fi action flick in the Halo universe. Although I am glad District 9 was made--fantastic movie!

Of course I'm also someone who enjoys movies like Shoot Em Up.

This is to Timothy Ryan regarding the feasibility of making a Halo adaptation. First to make any successful movie based on a video game requires first of all understanding the essence and appeal of the game and transforming that for the big screen. Halo's overall tone is like an ancient myth being told centuries afterwards. There is a religious and epic tone to the almost everything story related in the game. I would recommend reading "The man with a thousand faces" It's about the primordial myth that seems to come up in every movie from star wars to the matrix to lord of the rings. Halo is very doable, even if peter jackson did pass on it.(by the way directors pass up, move on, come back to later, all the time with movie projects, there's a lot of variables when it comes to projects lining up, so don't start reading tea leaves as fact.)

Max Bowman: It's called "Hero with a Thousand Faces", not "Man with ..." and of course I read it over 20 years ago a dozen times. If you like the book you should also read his "Masks of God" series. The Halo story is shallow and does little to portray the classic heroic cycle. Sure his journey is around a ring but the comparison ends there. To compare it to Star Wars is a slap in the face of Joseph Campbell and George Lucas. When ever is Master Chief ever dealing with inner turmoil - the so-called "conflicted hero" represented by the Dark Side and Luke's discovery of who his father is? When does Master Chief disappear into the Abyss, like Jonah in the belly of the whale, like Luke and company inside the garbage compactor inside the Death Star? When does Master Chief feel the call to fight like Luke does having seen his uncle and aunt burned at the farm by the empire and he comes to the decision to join Obi Wan and become a Jedi like his father? Come on ... you are way too blown away by nostalgia over the first decent shooter you played on the XBox, and that's all it was. Good game balance, good compromise on the controls and health mechanic to make it more approachable, and an OK story.

One has to wonder how Sam Raimi's World of Warcraft movie will turn out. How will it strike the balance between fans of WoW and the general audience?

WoW has had so many players that it doesn't really need to sell to anyone else to make a mint. :D

The simple fact of the matter is that when any source material crosses media there are difficulties involved. The book will be better than the movie, the tv show will be better than the movie meant to tie up all the loose ends after it was cancelled, the movie will be better than the game predating its release, etc... However, to say that the reason games made into movies will always be bad because "Games aren't a good storytelling medium." is bogus.

Games can be an incredible storytelling medium. True, some games tell their story mainly through cinematic cutscenes, but as the gaming medium evolves, so does the ability for truely compelling storytelling. In fact, games have an advantage over movies by the fact that there is simply more time to tell the story. In a movie, you have 3 hours at the most to tug at a person's heartstring and make them believe that their world is slightly different then before. (After all, aren't all stories supposed to impact people's lives?) Depending on the length of the game, there can be anywhere from 5-100+ hours to weave any number of compelling plots, scemes, betrayals, and so forth.

It's true that, more often than not, the goal of a video game is not to tell a moving story, but then again, the goal of most movies isn't to tell a compelling story either, it's to entertain. Science has proven time and time again that if given a choice between a good story, and an intense action thrill-ride, the average moviegoer would rather see the one where a guy gets a carrot shoved in his eye (no offense, Mr. Sterns, I also enjoyed Shoot Em Up).

The main problem is that, when adapting anything, people are afraid of offending the fans of the original source material. They think that if they stray too much from the source, people won't come to see it, and it is for this reason that terrible adaptations are made.

J.J. Abrams confessed that he had hardly watched any Star Trek before agreeing to the remake, and it was awesome. Charlie Kaufman was comissioned to write a film adaptation for the book "The Orchid Thief" and decided instead to write a movie about himself writing the adaptation, and it was phenomenal.

My point isn't that people writing adaptations should throw their source material into a fire, it's that instead of focusing on the plot, they should focus on the quality of the adaptation. The best parts of the spider-man movies had very little to do with spiderman canon. The pencil trick in the Dark Knight had nothing to do with the canon of the Joker and everything to do with awesomeness. Often, the best parts of an adaptation aren't what we recognize from the game we played, and everything to do with what's new.

The source material has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the final adaptation. Rather, the director, writer, and production cast/crew's willingness not to simply copy-paste something that works well on a different media, but rather to construct something new

Tie-ins are one way companies try to profit from the popularity of a product. Nintendo tried it in the early 1990s with the Mario Bros. brand. Educational software and movies were some of the big flops that almost killed the Mario brand. Does anyone remember this movie with Bob Hoskins?

Super Mario Bros. the Movie
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/super_mario_bros/

Video games can be material for good movies and vice versa, but most companies don't put the time and effort into making it work.

Some notable exceptions (IMHO - based on personal taste)

Resident Evil Trilogy
Lara Croft Tomb Raider

On the other side, movies made into films are also rarely stellar. Any tie-in developer can tell you that the primary goal is to get a product out in time for the movie. QA and playability come second, and that will always be a formula for disaster. Again, there are exceptions (various Star Wars games come to mind), but they are few and far between.

Frankly, one of my pet peeves is the claim that "games aren't a good storytelling medium". Let me just break it down.

a) In terms of narrative capability, games are essentially an interactive medium. (and computer games, interactive digital medium)
b) There is nothing about a narrative that precludes interactivity (See example: Interactive Theatre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_theatre and Forum Theatre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_theatre )

But back on topic, the whole success of how well a movie based on a game succeeds, depends on how well the original game created it's world. It's the difference between KotOR and Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi. The difference between Doom and Halo. The difference between Gran Turismo and Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune (granted the latter is based on a manga, but that also serves an example of how a linear narrative can be converted to an interactive medium as well.)

to Timothy Ryan, My apologies if my tone seemed pedantic and assholery, none of it was intentional. My issue was that the idea that halo wasn't fit for an adaptation. First I'm not a halo fanboy in the least, I like the game and what it did for fps shooters on consoles, but the story was non existent. There was a visual and aural style that tried to capture the feeling one would have with a mythological tale. Sorry about the man with a thousand faces. I just remembered it from the top of my head without looking up the actual title, my bad. Anyway Halo had enough of a "feel" to guide an adaptation and give it something to work with. While the game didn't have any character development(a decision I suspect rooted in the concept of keeping the game protagonist blank) that doesn't stop a more story focused medium providing one.

Honestly, I am not impressed with video game storytelling outside of Final Fantasy Tactics. Most of it is simple and tries to cover it up with genre tricks. I'm really waiting for something rivaling Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground in terms of plumbing our depths. And it shouldn't be that hard, we already have the goalposts.

Thanks for the comments.

A really successful movie--$200M domestic range--must have a larger audience than the devotees of any video game. So it cannot appeal only to the core who loved that game (some of whom will hate the movie no matter what...). Consequently, the movie may not be able to simply take the essence of what appealed in the video game, it has to go beyond that. (Remember, much of the appeal of video games is in one's own actions, and movie viewers cannot pariticipate in the action.)

If the world (setting) of the game is really interesting and detailed, then a movie derived from it could be exceptional--certainly more likely than a movie relying on a plot from a game.

Many people have written about how well or poorly games work as a storytelling medium. I've expressed my view, and don't think it's worth taking the time to discuss, it is so obvious. Those who think games are a good storytelling medium might try reading Greg Costikyan's take on this:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/storyish

(There's an older one online as well that puts the case even more strongly, he told me he prefers this more recent one.)

Reading about alice and kev got me thinking on the possibility of a dynamic character interactive system that creates it's own narratives. Think of typical game stories as a precooked event, whether it's an building exploding or a character dieing. It's all beads on a string and offer an experience that is extremely diminished on a second play through in terms of storytelling. A dynamic system would offer organically generated story based on what circumstances the AI characters find themselves in. Bethesda's experimental Radiant AI was a step in that direction. The original incarnation of the system gave the NPC Needs such as hunger, pain, pleasure seeking and what amounts to FREE WILL to pursue such desires. The original engine opened up a can of worms when it came to game killing bugs because of it. For example a guard character in one of their cities left his post to score some drugs, after he ran out of money he started stealing from other NPC in the game. The town character banded together into a mob and went out and killed him. This kept happening over and over again, and made the game unplayable. So the problem with such a system is that it's inherently more complex and prone to breaking than a simple beads on a string story system. In the end Bethesda went with a neutered version of it's Radiant AI, as this is too complex a problem to be solved at this time.
This is only the beginning of whats possible with an interactive medium such as games. Once we start offering really complex AI that can think for itself, plan ahead and make it's own choices, communicate with other AI with a speech system which is dynamic and not precooked(as we have now) Collude with each other against the player based on whats best for it. Of course we're far away from that. There needs to be a lot of research to provide an environment that doesn't brake the game on every play through.

It's true that, more often than not, the goal of a video game is not to tell a moving story, but then again, the goal of most movies isn't to tell a compelling story either, it's to entertain. Science has proven time and time again that if given a choice between a good story, and an intense action thrill-ride, the average moviegoer would rather see the one where a guy gets a carrot shoved in his eye (no offense, Mr. Sterns, I also enjoyed Shoot Em Up).