It’s been more like two weeks than a week. In ten days since the last update, I’ve written about 4000 words, which is a little ahead of my goal. (The goal started at 250 words a day, and I quickly bumped it up to 350). The Oxford Handbook chapter is coming along, and I’ve got two of its three or four major sections mostly drafted. Need to do a little more research and a little more outlining to get the second half right, but the chapter is well on its way. I’m finding myself being a bit more free with the writing this time, which is something I’m really trying to work on. Get the ideas out and get text in place, then edit and refine.
That’s not always the way I work. One of my favorite authors, William Gibson, has said in interviews that he often starts from the beginning of his manuscript and reads/edits the whole thing as he goes, rather than jumping right to the part he’s working on. I have trouble not doing that too, so one reason I’m focusing so much on new words is that I need to generate text faster rather than continuously polishing my favorite bits.
It’s been a complicated week: Monday started off with a sick kid, and the two of them have been trading off who’s in worse shape. Both have been to the doctor; both got swabbed; both are negative. Just garden variety kid colds. But this is really one of our first experiences with sick kids, and it’s amazing how much energy and attention it saps. You feel so bad for them :-( On top of that, two conferences that I’ve been attending remotely, the International Musicological Society’s Music and Media Study Group, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. I really wish the various regional music theory conferences that are also starting to kick into gear would run synchronously. There’s something about people actually being together, even if virtually, that is more compelling than watching talks in advance.
Next week I have a presentation at my institution’s “June Pedagogy Institute” - I’m collaborating with our educational technology director to talk about games in higher education, so I had two meetings to hash that session out, and I’ll deliver it on Monday. Summer class is humming along, although every Sunday also brings a big pile of grading. I’m nearly caught up at the moment, so will enjoy that for the day or so it lasts. Hopefully after Monday, I can push this chapter around the corner this week, and really start to get it into shape to submit at the end of the month.
I’d like to actually chronicle my research here rather than just talking about process and personal updates, so I’m pasting in one segment from early on in the essay, one of the points I’m still really mulling over. It proposes a taxonomy of game adaptations that seems to work for my purposes, but is still in need of some workshopping…
***
Games based on popular films can be understood in a number of ways. For the purpose of this chapter, I will refer to games within four general categories, which describe both the timeframe of their development and release, and their content.
Immediate movie tie-ins. Most film-to-game adaptations are based on a single film, and are produced so that they will appear concurrently with the source film’s release window. Prominent examples from the early days of game adaptations include Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari 2600, 1982) and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (Atari 2600, 1982). Immediate tie-ins would become the dominant model for film-based games from the 1980s through the early 2010s. In this form, games are part of the film’s marketing campaign, designed to draw attention to the release and encourage fans to engage more closely with the film or franchise.
Delayed adaptations. As the video game industry began to develop ties with Hollywood, many of the games released in the first wave of adaptations were actually based on films that were several years old. The Star Wars franchise, for example, saw several of these after-the-fact tie-ins. The Empire Strikes Back (1982) was one of the first adaptation games to appear on the Atari 2600 console, two years after the movie appeared. Atari’s famous Star Wars arcade game (the subject of one of this chapter’s case studies) arrived in 1983—a full six years after the May 1977 premiere of its source film. A similar situation arose with titles like Alien (released for Atari 2600 in 1982, based on the 1979 film) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (released in 1983, based on a film from 1974). We might attribute this phenomenon to an initial rush towards development once the general idea of film-to-game adaptations emerged, or an interest in prominent, existing intellectual properties that would position a new game for an existing audience.
In the early 1980s, delayed tie-ins were arguably equal in prominence to immediate tie-ins; both types of games participated in the emergence of the form. The phenomenon of the delayed tie-in had all but disappeared by the end of the decade, however, as game adaptations became more thoroughly integrated in studio marketing efforts, and thus more timely. The falling popularity of game adaptations over the last decade has coincided with a return to delayed adaptations, which are often presented in an anthology format. The LEGO series of adaptations (including LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Harry Potter, and LEGO Marvel’s Avengers), for instance, each treat several films from a well-established franchise, presenting each through the lens of a particular aesthetic—to say nothing of the direct affiliation with another brand of toy. Occasionally, latter-day tie-ins still appear, such as a 2006 adaptation of The Godfather (1972), which weaves a secondary character’s story within the events of the film.
Franchise adaptations. Some film-to-game adaptations do not attempt to translate a specific movie into playable form, but instead draw upon a larger media franchise for source material. In most cases, these games present highlights from well-known films, drawn together to create a string of gameplay experiences that re-enact prominent sequences from a franchise. James Bond 007 (1983), for example, features chase scenes from three (or in some versions of the game, four) Bond films released over the preceding decade. The same is true of an earlier Godfather adaptation (1991), an action game whose five levels span episodes from all three films, from the trilogy’s opening in 1946 to its end in 1981.
Franchise entries. While some games based on prominent franchises present themselves as collections of recognizable episodes, others present themselves as independent, original stories within a given fictional world. Star Wars games such as Dark Forces (1993), Knights of the Old Republic (2003), and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series, fit into a much larger multimedia property that includes not only films and television shows, but novels, comic books, toys, and other merchandise. Similar franchise-based efforts include The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor… [more examples]
