Games as films
Last week, by chance, I came across and purchased a video called "Dungeons & Dragons", which claimed to based on the Dungeons and Dragons game (sic). I have yet to see it (though according to role-playing filmbuff friend it sucks). I have always been interested in adaptations, the transferral of a story in one media to another media, so I'm trying to collate a list of "games made into films" for a future article on the subject. What is it you actually adapt, when you make a game-film? It cant really be the plot or the story (since games are not narratives, huh), so rather it must be the universe - or virtual world...- or characters; problem being that finite game characters are usually quite flat and the game universe not really that interesting if you cant interact with it yourself. So the films made so far are not very good, IMHO, perhaps for this reason. But could one imagine an interesting game-film concept? I am sure there is bound to be more of them around as games become a more and more intrinsic part of everyday popular culture.

Here is the list, I have so far: do you know of any others?

List of film made from games:
Dungeons & Dragons, 2000 (game: Dungeons & Dragons series?)
Resident Evil, 2002 (Game: Resident Evil)
Tombraider, 2001 (Game: The Tombraider Series)
Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, 2001 (Game: The Final Fantasy Series, 1-10??)
Tron (1982) (which according to this source is "the first fusion of game and movie, an arcade hit based on a film that was based on the video game phenomenon"). Tron 2.0 should be coming out in 2003!
Street Fighter, 1995 (based on arcade game)
Super Marios Bros., 1993 (based on the original gameboy ? games)

And State of Emergency, based on the PS2 should be in the making, according to some rumours.

There is a discussion about games to film here.

# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:56