It’s a positive criticism for anyone who takes one kind of media and has attempted to translate it into another. While taking a book and making it a film, or vice versa, has been difficult at best, turning either of the aforementioned into a game has been less successful. The same goes for turning a game into a film or a book applies just as much. Video and computer games have the whole thing about player participation and control that’s completely lacking in their adaptations, but arguably games can give an extra dimension when a source from another media is being adapted. It just might not make the best game.
The Polish developer Teyon understands the source material, sings the reviews for both Terminator: Resistance and the more recent Robocop: Rogue City. Their games aren’t cutting edge, have the highest of production values or are bug-free, but what they have nailed down with these two titles are the atmospheres the two movie franchises originally had going for them. Teyon has a history being a shovelware developer, but somebody had to take the job, gotta start somewhere, and they’ve learned quite a lot during those years.
Terminator or Robocop don’t adapt into games from the get go. You might have ideas how to do it, like how to use extended action set pieces from the movies or create increased content via deleted scenes or pathways. Good ideas in of themselves, but lacking in making the game stand out. You could go the classic method of adapting movies into games and make everything about the action, but nowadays people expect to have some lettuce on their meat too.
This lettuce is how the game frames the play. The best way is to frame things is to tie it into the play itself. In this Rogue City is pretty much a spiritual sequel to Resistance. Player role as Robocop extends as OCP police officer sees the player functioning directly as one. Sure, FMV are there to convey the overall story of the game, tough they’re there to frame things rather than force the player’s hand outside few exceptions. Funny enough, all the dialogue options Rogue City has are more interesting and have more effect on the game than those in Starfield. This system is a hand-me-down from Resistance, and already done in multitude of games past, like Fallout.
All that’s largely generic. What makes these two games stand out is the atmosphere and how the source material is treated. Nothing that’s unpresented in the movies isn’t added for the sake of Teyon’s own ego, but for the sake of play and variety. You could argue about the plot being shoved in, but that’s the nature of the beast. At least neither games’ plots fuck around with the established storylines in the movies, something that can’t be said about all other adaptions, or later Terminator movies.
Their Terminator picks and chooses and bits and bobs from everywhere to make the game a fuller game, but all the lock picking and item crafting are nothing new or special unto themselves. Adaptations always have to gamify things at least a little bit, or otherwise they’ll end up just giants walls of text, or nine hours of FMVs broken by short pieces of game.
Context matters and Teyon nails the context of these two games. This naturally limits the kind of games they can do based on these two IPs. Limitations are the drive for creativity, and while they didn’t have the budget or the time to polish everything up, these two games show how much we need these mid-road B-tier games. Both of them are competent and enjoyable games that replicate a piece of their IPs in a way that has fumbled before. Both use settings that we’ve seen Terminator and Robocop games before, but there has been no competency or attention to details.
To talk more about Robocop: Rogue City, Teyon understands Robocop can’t be made into a straight up shooting or action. That’s not what the first movie was about. The action is to make a point. Murphy’s murder sequence is treated seriously with no glorification. You’re shown every bit of excessive detail until he is finally given the mercy shot in the head. ED-209 shooting Kenny in the OCP boardroom lasts good forty-something seconds. Again, not to glorify violence, but make fun out of it, to blow it out of proportions. It turns into bloody comedy. Rogue City does this across the board. There’s even an upgrade option to increase the amount of gore in the game, but that’s also where the game has to meet the movie. Effectively, all the shooting stages, sequences, whatever you want to call them, use the factory shootout as its template. That means you can’t make Robocop functions like any other modern FPS with fast and slick action. No, Robocop’s a slow and meticulous walking tank with a burst-fire hand cannon. He’s always against superior numbers with a variety of weapons, most of Robo’s armor shrugs off and with upgrades can ricochet shots back. He can grab and throw thugs without any issues, and only the heaviest melee weapon works on him.
That’s a limitation for the game’s action play. Nailing that feeling of the player being almost invulnerable and having massive gunfights is just the first step. The rest is about making it satisfying elsewhere. Stages need to be planned out to work within the framework, secondary weapons to fit both the movie’s era and player needs. Enemies need to have variety of caliber guns and other weapons, and tactics, to depict the movie properly while offering the player varieties of challenges. If you’d be adapting Robocop the movie, it’d be a bitch to make the rest about Robot Jesus’ resurrection fit in. However, when you’re adapting the idea and overall IP, then you’re creating more room in this strict box to explore and perhaps even expand on both how well Robo shoots criminals and explore the humanity of the work. It’s easy to step outside the box and invent your own shit from the air, and very few can make that work. A look at the recent Star Trek shows how badly wrong you can go without limitations.
Limitations and understanding the work go hand in hand. However, just like Teyon’s two examples here, often its better to adapt and translate the core idea of the IP rather than try force a square peg into a round hole. Jurassic Park tends to have a terrible track record when it comes to games. The recent park builder games have been the best out of the lot alongside Operation Genesis, but they’re lacking the brainier side of the IP. Granted, so are all the sequel movies, but that’s neither here or there. None of the Jurassic Park games have really even attempted that, just given the whole thing some lip service. However, I must give Ocean some credit with their JP games, they didn’t really have the best cards to play with.
Though we have to consider the other side of the coin as well; what does the customer get out of it a game being accurate to the IP? If they’re fans or in-the-know about things, they get a good time with a competent game. It’s a factor the squares the enjoyment.
Opposite of this would be a player who gets a competent game, but would miss the referential nature of the game even if it manages to nail the atmosphere and tone. Take how Robocop’s gunplay works from above. A person who has never seen the game can infer from the game why the game is how it is, but without the context of the movie, it’s very easy to assume its nothing but unfriendly design and going against the mainstream trends. As an example, there’s a sub-quests in Rogue City, where the player has to scan shelves of cassettes in a rental store and discuss the nature of films with one of the characters. For general public, this most likely is just filler, busywork to pad out the game’s runtime. For fans of Robocop this is rather blatant discussion about the franchise in general, referencing e.g. how Paul Verhoeven threw Robocop’s script into the trash after a first read, but his wife read it through to pass the time and convinced her husband that the movie had more to it than just what’s on the surface. It might be filler still, but it’s still filler than engages certain people more.
The best way to adapt something to another media? Don’t. Take a look at how the new Super Mario Bros. movie did it. It didn’t even attempt to adapt any of the Mario games, but rather the whole franchise overall. There is no way to translate the direct control of Mario into a passive media. Some of the older TV shows tried to replicate the action of the games into choreography or depicted the characters from a certain angle. This is more or less turning how Teyon worked to make their games work, but you can’t take action from games and expect it to be as entertaining or engaging in a passive medium. Seeing Mario jump in a Goomba the Nth time when you’re in control is not the same as seeing in on the screen in a cartoon.
I heard this example from somewhere, source is lost to time; a man walking through a desert for one hour without any cuts is boring to watch. A player controlling that man walking through that desert is riveting. An experienced film director would beg to differ, trying to make it interesting and probably would succeed. At the same time, a game that creates its walking mechanic and its desert a challenge to the player engages on a different level. The player becomes the walker as the controller, and each player would have their own version of the desert walking story.
I’m not sure if Teyon, or any other developer for the matter, conceptualized how a game’s story always revolved around the play of the player. Dialogue trees a crude but very easy example of player options that are apparent and easy to explain and showcase how the player has influenced the story. Less so when you’re asked something like What’s the canon method Mario defeated Bowser in SMB1?
Understanding that games require organic options under a set of rules makes adapting IP form another medium easier. However, adaptions that adhere strongly to their source materials suffer because they don’t have those options to give to the player. The current trendy term seems to be emergent gameplay and player expression, but both are just fancy words for options and choices. Some are realizing that playing a game is more or less the same thing as smashing two figures together in a directed play session under a framing device. That’s what games at their core are; Here’s the scene, how will you play it? Most people seem to follow the guidance games give closely, while others seem to aim to break the games as much as they can. Sometimes games reward this, like how Nier: Automata has those multiple little endings for certain little actions the player can allowed to do.
The worst of movie-to-game adaptions follow the leadline too closely while trying to gamefy what little they can work with. It’s easy to end up with a product that doesn’t really reflect the source material. We could argue that at one point that was a given either due to limitations of the technology or because of lack of experience in the industry in general. I don’t believe neither of this though. Ever since films and literature have adapted each other back and forth, the paradigm has been to adhere as close to the source material as possible. The dimension of choice games adds of course throws a monkey wrench to Hollywood’s gears as they can’t adapt that. Thus, glorifying games’ stories and industry elevating those that make the best use of film method of storytelling over how games can do it. Books suffer as well, though it would be interesting to see a well-versed author trying to gamefy a video game adaptation by making a choose-your-adventure book instead of a linear story.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Perhaps the film and literature industries could do the same thing to games, and simply take the overall spirit of a game and build a whole story around that they could tell. That would demand the adapters would need to respect and understand these games, and seeing the track record adapting games into other media is about as spotty as vice versa, I’m not holding my breath.
Aaltomies 