Blogs of the Round Table: Indiana Jones and the Quest for a Great Film Adaptation

In my followup to my own post in the June round table I wandered around some of the topics of Hollywood and Video Gaming and there's a pretty good core mantra that I think bears repeating:

The thing to learn from the "interactive movie" mess is not that "interactive movies are bad", it's that you can almost shoehorn a bad game into a good movie (Dragon's Lair) and you can certainly cross a good game with a good movie (Wing Commander 3 and UAKM), but do not ever think that it is a good idea to make a bad movie more palatable by shoehorning in a bad game to the experience. We learn that Hollywood fails to understand gaming as far back as the early 90s and that smart game companies can build good games that make use of Hollywood know-how to intertwine good movies into the gameplay.

It's about interactive movies, but I think the general principles are sound and pretty applicable to the entire intersection of Hollywood and Video Gaming. Both are subtly different art forms with almost widely divergent (but co-evolved from similar roots) tools. Mistakes happen when one or the other side underestimates the other, or tries to bludgeon their way through the other art with nothing more than a tight deadline and lots of cash.

Let me tell an allegory of two games: Long, long ago in a Californian city far, far away (to me right now, at least) was a company founded by a well to do Hollywood gentleman. This company had a vast and easy profit center in the gentleman's ...