By Florian Oertel Jan 14, 2007, 12:26 GMT
Bottrop Racing along the curves, tyres screeching, Doc Hudson the road cruiser shouts, 'This is how a race ought to be!'
This would be the part where the audience laughs in a movie. But this is not Cars the movie, it's the video game. More and more movies and computer games are getting released in tandem. It's an old idea that sometimes leads to huge successes. Other times it's a flop.
Games to accompany movies have been around as long as video games, says Stephan Slabihoud of Bottrop. He documents the genre on the website www.8bit-museum.de.
'This started in the early 1980s with arcade games,' he says. Those early titles included Nintendo's Donkey Kong.' The game focussed on a gorilla that had kidnapped a woman similar to the King Kong movie.' But the movie distributor Universal didn't like the association and responded with a copyright lawsuit, which it lost.
But most adaptations into computer games have Hollywood's full backing. 'The movies used this to make licensing money,' says Guido Alt of Sony Computer Entertainment in Neu-Isenburg, near Frankfurt. At the same time, game developers were always interested in turning movie heroes into the stars of their games.
But the results were often disappointing. 'These adaptations were flops 90 per cent of the time,' said Slabihoud, from both a technical and a commercial perspective. 'The usual problem was the gameplay.' Most of today's industry insiders agree. Many games were low quality, says Paul Ashcroft of THQ, the game producer from the German town of Krefeld that has just released the Cars game adaptation.
'E.T. is a prime example of an early flop. Expecting the movie blockbuster to translate into a gaming hit, Atari produced millions of E.T. games for its 2600 console.
'But the game was a catastrophe,' says Slabihoud. Consumers agreed and Atari found itself sitting on a huge inventory of unsold games. 'Those games are probably buried in the desert somewhere,' says Andre Horn, chief editor of the Munich-based magazine GamePro.
Movies based on video games predate 2001, when Angelina Jolie turned the pixilated archeologist Lara Croft into flesh and blood. Turning a game into a movie, just like turning a movie into a game, is no guarantee of success.
'At the start of the 90s there was a live action film version of Super Mario Bros.' with Bob Hoskins in the starring role it was a disaster,' says Horn.
But in the meantime, there has been an ever growing list of examples where the transfer from movie to game or vice versa, has worked. Horn points to the recent successes of King Kong and Lord of the Rings.
'People pay more attention to the gameplay now,' says Slabihoud.
The fact that game and film producers often work hand in hand has led to a merger of working styles says Horn.
'When you're making the animation for a film like Spiderman, it's easy to go ahead and use it for a computer game too. During filming, sensors are becoming increasingly common as a way of capturing an actor's movements. The game is then based off this data,' said Horn.
This motion capture technology has been used for games like the 2006 Sony Playstation release 24. The game accompanied the real-time TV show and used lifelike animation based on actor Kiefer Sutherland.
'It's a bridge between the second and third seasons of the series,' says Sony's Alt. Sutherland probably didn't mind his movements being recorded for the game's use.
'Computer games are a good vehicle for actors to increase their market value,' says Horn.
Doc Hudson, the old cruiser from Cars couldn't care less about his market value. After all, he's got a lot of miles left in him. Then again, he's no flesh and blood star like a lot of creatures gracing screens these days, including the penguins from the Warner Bros film Happy Feet.
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