For decades, Hollywood looked at video games and saw an obvious opportunity. Millions of players already knew the characters, recognised the worlds, and were emotionally invested in the franchises. How difficult could turning that into a movie possibly be?
As it turns out, quite difficult.
This week, ‘Geekstorians’ heads back to the cinema for ‘Hollywood Learns To Play’, exploring Hollywood’s long, strange and frequently baffling relationship with video games.
And there are few better places to begin than 1993.
Nintendo’s Super Mario games were colourful, energetic, and built around the uncomplicated joy of making a little plumber jump over things. The resulting Super Mario Bros. movie gave audiences a grimy parallel dimension, humanoid dinosaurs, a suspicious amount of fungus, and Dennis Hopper (Blue Velvet, Speed) as a corporate lizard dictator.
Somewhere between the controller and the cinema screen, something had gone rather wrong.
But Mario was far from alone.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, studios repeatedly tried to crack the supposedly cursed video game movie. Budgets grew. Games became more cinematic. Filmmakers had increasingly sophisticated worlds, characters, and stories to work with.
And yet, something still seemed to get lost on the journey.
In ‘Hollywood Learns To Play’, Dave digs into why adapting a game creates a very different problem from adapting a novel or comic book. What exactly are you adapting when part of the appeal isn’t something you watch, but something you actually do?
How do you translate timing, exploration, failure, discovery, and the simple satisfaction of finally making that bloody jump you’ve missed six times?
And what happens when filmmakers concentrate on everything that can be put on a poster while overlooking the thing players were actually responding to?
The episode travels through several generations of attempts as Hollywood gradually works out what it has been missing. There are fighting tournaments, ancient tombs, zombies, assassins, and at least one hedgehog whose first encounter with photorealism did not go especially well.
Eventually, though, something changes.
Films and television begin approaching games differently, and some adaptations start achieving something that once seemed remarkably difficult: making fans feel that the people behind them actually understand why anyone loved the game in the first place.
So, were video game adaptations really cursed? Or had Hollywood simply spent decades pressing the wrong buttons?
You can find out in the latest episode of ‘Geekstorians’, ‘Hollywood Learns To Play’, using the player on this page.
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