Game Girl Advance has a post up about a marketing survey that sounded pretty interesting.
The phone rang at 9am Sunday, interrupting my sleep-in. "Hello," a low male British voice said, "I'm calling from Future Publishing in the UK - do you have time to answer a few questions?"
It was a cross-Atlantic game marketing survey. "I'm going to list a number of movies and books. Tell me if you've seen them, read them, heard of them." Then he had me assign a number value - 10 would make a "brilliant game" and 1 was not worth mention.
Goodfellas? Godfather? Donnie Brasco? Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? A Bronx Tale? Gangs of New York? The Untouchables? The Magnificent Seven? Guns of Navarone? The Great Escape? Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction? Kill Bill? La Femme Nikita? The Professional? The Good the Bad and the Ugly? Apocalypse Now? The French Connection? Thunderbirds?
...
Then he asked me what books, movies or TV shows should be turned into games. What a terrific question! I hadn't given that much thought before. I thought of a million movies and books, but it was too easy to imagine the type of game they would be. I wanted to name media that would be challenging, and perhaps beautiful, different virtual worlds for rewarding exploration. My first choice was easy:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What kind of game would that make? My interviewer hadn't heard of it - I sent him to the bookstore.
What great work would you want to see translated into a game? [gamegirladvance.com]
This makes me think of a game I had years ago called The Dark Eye, which was based on some of Edgar Allen Poe's work. It was pretty cool, but didn't really work that well as a game for me (though it was cool living out some of the stories).
I'm not sure what other things I'd want to try as a video game. The comments at game girl advance have some interesting ideas, like Hard Boiled Wonderland. My personal feeling is that books could make great settings for games. I'd like to see more cases of game designers starting with a universe from a book or movie and creating something interesting and original. The best recent example I can think of is KOTOR.
