What about games impacting Hollywood?

YL: I would say Resident Evil is probably the single best original game to become a movie and a lot of that is because the movie is true to the kicking-zombie-butt gameplay style. Milla Jovovich is just encapsulating the persona in that film. Even so, Resident Evil is a smaller-scale success.

We've yet to see a game truly spawn a movie on the caliber of the game. In the sense that, to pick an example of Madden: The Movie, where you have a seminal game experience that's defined a genre and which has attracted a giant movie audience. We haven't seen that result in a parallel movie experience yet.

But is that something you would expect to happen?

YL: I think that it's something that will happen. I actually think that the phenomenon of 300 is really, in fact, a manifestation of the video game experience in kind of the collective conscience. The audience who came to see 300 was weaned on video games and what they saw in the marketing materials for 300 was a similar experience. They didn't show up because they were interested in the Spartans, or because they read Herodotus, or because they thought the Battle of Thermopylae was a great, untold story.

They showed up because they saw a movie experience that was the most similar to the game experiences that they've grown up playing. The movie works because it's violent and it's actually very video game-ish. Even though it's based on a graphic novel, the execution of that graphic novel was more to video games and so you could say 300 is the first video game movie translation even though it's not really based on a video game.

Why did the Super Mario Bros. movie fail?

YL: That game is a very simple experience. It's just really fun and funny. And it's not a character-based experience. It's not a story. It's a series of one-off, random comedic experiences. Creating a plot around that and giving Mario a personality is just a tough thing to do. Plus, the movie was poorly executed.

Why do you think Lara Croft was able to have some success?

YL: Lara Croft had some success because Angelina Jolie as a physical manifestation of Lara Croft was really compelling to the audience. I don't think that it captured a lot of the ingenuity of Lara Croft, but I think that it was an embodiment for the audience of the character that a lot of the audience thought was appropriate.

I also think that part of the joy of playing the Lara Croft games is watching Lara Croft and the same thing held true for the movie. There's a certain joy in watching Angelina Jolie. I suppose there is also some joy in playing Angelina Jolie, but I haven't seen that in a game format. The point is that they are two different experiences. There is the interactivity of playing the character and having that experience in your imagination and then there is the other aspect of it, which is watching that character go through a story arc.

They did less of a good job of that, that's why I think it hasn't sustained itself. If you matched Lara Croft up to Indiana Jones there is no comparison because Indiana Jones is a compelling character going through a great story arc. Lara Croft was a potentially compelling character going through an okay story arc.