Famicom Dojo Podcast: Video Game Movies

As much as I’d love to talk about Scott Pilgrim, I’ll save it for the Famicom Dojo Scott Pilgrim megacast spectacular.  My point was that it embraced its video gamey-ness, which isn’t something I’ve ever seen an actual video game movie do.    The movie never others any explanations for why people can do all of this awesome video game stuff, they just run with it.  Its something I’d like to see someone try with a video game movie.

I totally agree with your second point.   The entire point of video games is to provide an interactive experience, and when you remove that from the equation, your left with something less.  You mentioned making a Final Fantasy movie by just using cutscenes from a game.  You might recall this was actually done with the first Xenosaga game.  It was offered as a preorder bonus for the second game.  I haven’t watched it though because from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty dull.  Then again, that could be in reference to the game in general, which featured looooong cutscenes. 

Of course, another reason for the lackluster video game movies might be that your standard video game these days has about as much time as it needs to tell its story.  Movies generally have about three hours or less with an hour and half being the preferred length.  I’ve played games where the plot hasn’t even started after that amount of time!  Maybe the more apt comparison would be between movies and books.  While their are plenty of good book to movie translations, almost always the book seems to be better.  Of course, books were around long before movies, and to some extent they informed the movie making process.  Video games are only under 40 years old at this point, and games with actual plots are even younger than that.  Maybe maybe when people who grew up with video games become firmly established directors and producers we will start seeing decent adaptations.

Also, I don’t know if I’m impressed or disappointed that you went a whole podcast talking about video games and movies without mentioning The Wizard.  Or were you saving that for your Movies inspired by Video games podcast?