We have all seen many video games turned into movies. Whether it be Doom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, or even Super Mario Bros., all of these flicks have been produced by Hollywood directors and have been full fledged popcorn entertainment films. Yet, we haven’t really seen many video game companies creating the films themselves. But is that a good thing?
Since there have been talks of a Half-Life movie coming into the works, Valve, the makers of the game, wouldn’t be totally against putting Gordon Freeman on the silver screen, but they are starting to prefer the idea of making the movie themselves. Gabe Newell, CEO and co-founder of Valve has been approached by many producers and studios to get a movie made based on Half Life made, but apparently none of them really attempt to keep the true aura of the games properly composed when thinking of a script.
PC Gamer spoke with Newell who said that he would rather see a World of Warcraft film produced by Blizzard rather than a big name Hollywood director such as Sam Raimi.
“As a WoW player, I would much rather that the WoW team made the movie, right? Than anybody else. I like Sam Raimi, I’ve been a fan ever since Evil Dead came out, but I would rather see Blizzard making the movie. We think that customers are like, ‘OK, we’re kind of sick and tired of the way you guys are slicing and dicing the experience of being a fan of Harry Potter, or Half-Life, or The Incredibles, and you need to fix it.’ And the people that fix it will be rewarded, and the people that don’t will be on the rubbish heap of history, or whatever the phrase is.”
Valve has already been exploring making their own media with the Team Fortress 2 shorts Meet The Team. It doesn’t seem too far fetched for Valve to make this Half Life film since content that they produce already, that isn’t based around gameplay, recieves mostly positive reactions.
“There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of…That’s when we started saying ‘Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.’ And I was like, ‘Make it ourselves? Well that’s impossible.’ But the Team Fortress 2 thing, the Meet The Team shorts, is us trying to explore that.”
Some of the meet the team shorts are better than others out there, but in terms of cut scenes, it’s hard to find a game company that creates them better than Valve. Many of them can come off as anywhere from okay to just dreadful, but you rarely are not entertained while waiting for your game to start back up while playing Half-Life. There are many people who strongly believe that they should already be creating movies, and if they hopefully are able to get Freeman’s character to translate well onto the big screen, well hopefully movies coming from video games may have more nerdy developers working on them rather than hot shot Hollywood producers.
Do you think Valve could make a great Half-Life movie? Would you be excited to see it if it was released?