Movies and Video Games

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Creating games based on movies is always a spin on the roulette table. If the timing is right, if the game uses the movie material well, the game is a hit, otherwise, word of the game spreads, and it finds itself relegated to the bargain bin, a mere three months later. Usually what happens during the production of these games it that so much is spent on the license for the material, that little money is left for the construction of the game itself. These days, the budget for games is huge, and so games aren't built unless there's a good indication they can at least make the development cost back.

The worst game based on movie of all-time is probably the Atari 2600 version of ET. As the story goes, Atari had predicted, based on the success of the movie that an E.T. game would do tremendously well and set about securing the rights for an E.T. game. Within two weeks, a game was made, and sent to be mass-produced. The game was a disaster. Atari had overpredicted the sales of the game: the decided that not only would they make enough cartidges to sell one to every one who owned an Atari 2600, but they thought the game could sell their consoles too -- so they made twice the number of catridges than Atari 2600 consoles sold. I hear that somewhere in Mexico is a landfill full of E.T. cartridges.

Konami, the people who brought you DDR and Metal Gear Solid are creating a King Arthur game, based on the movie, which opens today. Instead of tying the game to the movie's release however, Konami has tied the release date to that of the DVD. I find this decision interesting, only because, to my knowledge, no one has ever tried this before. The theory, I am guessing is that when you go into the store to purchase King Arhur on DVD, you also pick up King Arthur the game. This is, in my mind, a stupid decision -- $20 for the DVD, $50 for the game -- no one is going to spend $70 in one trip on King Arthur merchandise.

Spider-Man 2, a movie which took in all kinds of money this holiday weekend, has just Spider-Man shipped 2 Million units of their video game. They've taken the approach of timing their release with the movie, in an effort to ride a bit of the media frenzy the movie has generated. The gamble might pay off. It's hard to say, the game "The Hulk" based on the movie of the same name did pathetic (but the movie wasn't much better). While you have games like Chronicles of Riddick do well as a game and horrible at the box office.

This weekend, I found myself engaged in numerous game-related discussions -- this always happens once people realize that I work in the games industry (which always comes up because people always ask what I do, and I have not yet come up with a better answer than to state my occupation). I had an opportunity to share my thoughts and knowledge on the demise of graphical adventure games and the rise of the MMOG. There are some game types now that are ripe for a return -- puzzle games and side scrollers have recently made a return via flash and I expect that graphical adventure games will be next to become flash games. The reason is simple -- this is the natural evolutionary cycle of games. As games fall away from the mainstream commercial path, they are revived (typically by fans) on the internet.

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