5 Tips For Making Video Game Movies That Don't Totally Suck

By Laurence Gardner /

4. Characters

Directors trying to adapt books to the big screen are lucky, as fans don€™t have such a concrete mental image of the hero as gamers do. You might have read a physical description, but the difference between the two separate images of a character generated by a pair of readers can be quite astonishing. With this in mind, the director should stay very, very faithful to the game€™s rendition of the character while adapting it to a live-action medium. No easy task, and another difficulty arises with the personality of the protagonist. Many games allow you to choose the protagonist€™s words, and almost all allow you to choose his or her actions. With every gamer projecting his own personality onto the protagonist, it€™s quite difficult for a film-maker to do them justice. In these terms, a character such as Nathan Drake lends himself better to adaptation because his personality is present and distinctive throughout the games, and there€™s very little player influence. Lara Croft, on the other hand, is largely silent in the early games (the good ones), so is much harder to represent on the big screen.