Leave the gun, keep the cannoli
In the last month, I've played both the Godfather and the From Russia with Love video games. They are different, in my mind, than other games that I've played before, because they wrap part of the real films into the game.
The Godfather even uses Marlon Brando's and Robert Duvall's voices (among others). Famous cut scenes from the movie are interspersed as "rewards" for successful gameplay. You play as an unknown thug, running errands for movie characters like Clemenza. There are two problems with the game. First is that for some unknown legal reason, they could not use Al Pacino's voice and apparently not his face, because they obviously went to great pains to create a new character that wouldn't trigger a lawsuit. The second problem is that the game sucks. Really sucks. On a scale of 10 to -1, where getting drunk at Mardi Gras is a 9 and Disney World is a 5 and kissing your grandmother and feeling tongue is a 2, then playing the Godfather video game is a 1. Yes, it's that bad.
From Russia with Love is a better game, although it's quirky, too. First off, there's the well-known James Bond theme and the infamous shoot-em-in-the-eye opening sequence. The game plot at first seems to be off from the movie, but the next thing you know Robert Shaw is killing the fake James Bond at the SMERSH training camp, stripping off the rubber Sean Connery mask. The game is really, really good at tracking the movie and is probably one of the closest true "interactive" games. I have never cared for the gameplay in Bond games and this isn't much of an exception, but the movie part is amazing. They've replicated much of the movie, scene for scene by rendering the film into game animation. This has the added advantage of permitting them to use the actors' voices from the movie, since the action matches the original film.
The future of this kind of mixed genre should be very interesting. For one thing, this provides another way to milk a few more bucks out of a movie. Sure, lots of them are using video game tie-ins already, but sooner or later, a so-so movie is going to spawn a great game franchise, the way that the so-so Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie became a much better television series. See a trend here? Movies to games. Games to movies (Super Mario Brothers, Doom), comic books to movies (Hellboy, Spiderman), movies to comic books.
The most valuable thing in the very near thing is recognizable brands that can drive content, because content is technology agnostic. Create a new copyrighted character, get it in peoples' faces and my boy, get rich. Hello, Mickey Mouse. Hello, Superman. Hello, Kitty.
Posted on June 29, 2006
