Novel to Video Game.

merper · Oct 7, 2007

So video games are probably still in the emergent phase of their mass market appeal, but the industry is continuing to grow at an exponential rate. The story element is not a negligible part of most games, and if games based off movies can become blockbusters(such as Goldeneye 64), then there's no reason developers shouldn't turn to authors.

Obviously certain genres are out in the cold altogether on this, but depending on the type of game, many genres could fit. Thrillers can be turned into first person shooters. Historical fic could supply the missions for real time strategy games. Fantasy and Sci Fi are obvious picks for RPGs and MMORPGs. Middle grade fiction of all sorts could work in youth targeted console games.

Yet, the only example I can think of is Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon empire. However, he himself founded the company Red Storm Entertainment which made the first Rainbow 6 games, before selling it off to Ubisoft.

Factoring out the inevitable Harry Potter games made solely for cashing in, does anyone know of any examples of books rights being sold for games? Better yet does anyone have any first-hand experience in selling rights for their novel to a software developer? Would this operate the same as movie rights?

J. R. Tomlin · Oct 7, 2007

In 1993 the game Betrayal at Krondor came out based derived directly on the fantasy world of Raymond Feist's books. He didn't write it though and only later did he turn it into a book as Krondor: The Betrayal and events taking place in the game were subsequently written into later novels in the Riftwar series. Of course, movies have been made into games but none of them very good, imo.

Edit: Let me mention that Betrayal was a very good game.

PeeDee · Oct 7, 2007

There was a game called Advent Something or another which was "written" by Orson Scott Card. It was supposed to be a multimedia event. Three games, three books, a movie, etc.

We got one crappy game, and nothin' else. Which was fine...

There were also the stellar text-based games. Harlan Ellison's I have no mouth and I must scream which won a major award. Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the amazing Starship Titanic.

blacbird · Oct 7, 2007

The Scarlet Letter, the video game: Be first to condemn Hester Prynne for her immorality!

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the video game: Succeed in capturing escaped slave Jim, the one who can sell him for the most money wins!

The Trial, the video game: You are K., and you must escape conviction!

Moby Dick, the video game: You only have one leg, and you must kill the ferocious and scheming white whale!

Animal Farm, the video game: Be the most equal among the animals!

Remembrance of Things Past, the video game: See how long you can exist, doing nothing, without getting bored into paralysis!

caw

Garpy · Oct 8, 2007

Dune, being the first one that springs to mind. There was also an awful game based on the fantastic scifi series 'Riverworld'.

But generally speaking, the dumb I'll-buy-a-game-coz-I-recognise-its-based-on-a-Vin Diesel movie crowd don't actually read books, so I imagine the book-to-game gravy train offers lean pickings

PeeDee · Oct 8, 2007

Garpy said:
But generally speaking, the dumb I'll-buy-a-game-coz-I-recognise-its-based-on-a-Vin Diesel movie crowd don't actually read books, so I imagine the book-to-game gravy train offers lean pickings

Ohh, I don't know about that one, I thnk you'd be surprised. Especially the crowd you're specifically talking about, which is Chronicles of Riddick, a game which is a prime example of how to tell a really good story in an interactive medium.

Now the jocks who play Madden every year and the jocks who line up for Halo (and I do mean jocks...the assholes in college dorms with their colored bracelets, sideways hat, popped collar), I don't think that they could read a book if their life depended on it.

...and actually, the other crowd I find almost illiterate more and more is the RPG crowd. The teenagers. (****ing teenagers...leave my hobbies alone). An increasing trend I found while workign in a bookstore is that those idiots who at 15, play World of Warcraft nonestop (a fun game, but...) discovered Final Fantasy at game TEN and are barely aware of the others, watch things like inYuasha, and read manga...they are almost completely incoherent.

(and they use words like "bishi" and thus should be hung by the neck until dead)

jodiodi · Oct 8, 2007

The most literate games I've found were the survival horror games. Yes, I'm a Silent Hill devotee, and SH2, especially, lends itself well to literary interpretation. The Fatal Frame games, Run Like Hell, Kuon, and multiple others are quite literate and depend on more than just fast hands and button mashing.

Frankly, I'd love to write something that would spawn a game.

PeeDee · Oct 8, 2007

I'd like to write for a game. I think that the few times that fiction writers have traveled over and tried to do it, they got the medium wrong. They try to write it like a movie. I think the last one to get it right was Douglas Adams.

A friend, and myself, are slowly building a couple of video games, and one of the whole points is knowing how to be a writer and serve a story within an entirely new medium. I delight in it. The first thing to realize is that the novelist, the short story, the screenwriting, rules don't apply.

Prawn · Oct 8, 2007

I think games from movies may not be so great, but what about movies from games? I though DOOM was great fun as a movie. The Boob Raider series might not have been such interesting movies were it not for the additions of Angelina Jolie

PeeDee · Oct 8, 2007

Tomb Raider was a more interesting duo of movies than it was video game. Honestly, the Tomb Raider games are constantly ten years behind...

And Resident Evil? Those are terrifically fun movies based on games.

(Of course, then you get something like "Alone in the Dark" that ruins the whole theory....)

Movies-TO-games don't always suck. Spider-Man 2, the game, was one of the coolest games ever, after all. And then there was....you know...um.....

Spider-Man 2 rocked!

merper · Oct 8, 2007

But generally speaking, the dumb I'll-buy-a-game-coz-I-recognise-its-based-on-a-Vin Diesel movie crowd don't actually read books, so I imagine the book-to-game gravy train offers lean pickings

Well this is true and it's not true. Like someone mentioned, the people who play madden may not be the type who care at all about story. But even Halo - and I laugh anytime tries to explain that fighting aliens for a superweapon is a deep story - has spawned books that do oddly well.

I've had different experiences with RPG players than PeeDee. Yes, I know the type he talks about, but most of them also read books heavily, mostly in sci fi and fantasy. Even if the book itself doesn't build the sort of hype that would attract gamers, I think a world that is built well enough would be very attractive to a developer because they could save time just focusing on the programming aspect.

merper · Oct 8, 2007

I think games from movies may not be so great, but what about movies from games?

Apparently Final Fantasy Advent Children was pretty good. If you played final fantasy, which I didn't. It still looked good though.

PeeDee · Oct 8, 2007

merper said:
Well this is true and it's not true. Like someone mentioned, the people who play madden may not be the type who care at all about story. But even Halo - and I laugh anytime tries to explain that fighting aliens for a superweapon is a deep story - has spawned books that do oddly well.

I really enjoyed Halo. But try telling anyone Hey, it's Ringworld, by Larry Niven! and you get looks of "Duhr?"

Mostly, I find video games as literate as, say, TV watchers. Movie goers. Book readers. Etc. It doesn't necessarily lend you to a certain clique if you play video games, after all.

merper said:
I've had different experiences with RPG players than PeeDee. Yes, I know the type he talks about, but most of them also read books heavily, mostly in sci fi and fantasy. Even if the book itself doesn't build the sort of hype that would attract gamers, I think a world that is built well enough would be very attractive to a developer because they could save time just focusing on the programming aspect.

Sure, there are plenty of wonderfully smart RPG players. It's just a genre, so any blanket statement is only right to a point. I was just ranting.

jodiodi · Oct 8, 2007

Alone in the Dark was directed by Uwe Boll, the Kiss of Death to video-game related movies (Bloodrayne, House of the Dead). Alone in the Dark was a GREAT game and could have been a great movie ... in the hands of a decent directior and scriptwriter.

Silent Hill was an OK movie, but I prefer the games. Movies are also planned on Fatal Frame and Onimusha.

I enjoyed Doom as well. I liked the game and really thought the FPS scenes in the movie were great.

I'd like to write a video game, but don't know how. Hence, I can only hope my stories inspire one.

Carrie R. · Oct 8, 2007

I think Spiderwick Chronicles (Holly Black) is being turned into a video game (the movie is out this year as well).

lfraser · Oct 8, 2007

It seems to me that video games are getting dumber as time goes on. More and more they seem to be geared towards the hack n' slash crowd.

I was crushed flat not once but twice in the space of a year when the third installment of Thief and the so-called sequel to Deus Ex came out. All the scope and originality and humour were gone, replaced with tiny areas suitable for the attention-deficit crowd, 'improvements' that were geared towards making the games easier to play without thinking, and plots that took second place to the action. Similarly, the Splinter Cell games seem to have been dummied-down. I still play the first one in the series, but the rest leave me quite cold.

I still play some of my older games though, the ones that were actually developed with a decent story line, like the old Black Isle games, or a spark of originality, like American McGee's Alice.

I have to confess that I did like the Tomb Raider games, though -- the first ones. Those never pretended to be anything but what they are. And Lara Croft was the first action heroine to appear in the video game world. If not for Lara, would I be able to select a female dwarf fighter with a sultry voice to lead my party in an RPG?

jodiodi · Oct 8, 2007

Oh I adored AM's Alice. My favorite books ever were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. So this game was right up my alley. I still have it loaded on one of my desktop computers at home along with Doom3, Undying, and Missing.

DVGuru · Oct 8, 2007

merper said:
But even Halo - and I laugh anytime tries to explain that fighting aliens for a superweapon is a deep story - has spawned books that do oddly well.

I loved the story in the first Halo, but the second one lost me, and now with the third one I don't care about the story at all. Although the game has it's hardcore fans that will argue to their deaths that it's the best story in a videogame ever (170 million dollars in one day is no small feat, especially for the game industry), I think the majority of gamers play Halo for the multiplayer. But no, it's definitely not a deep story.

The problem with having deep stories in videogames is that a developer has to think of the gameplay before anything else. It can have the greatest story ever told, but if playing the game isn't fun, nobody is going to want to play it. Take a game like Bioshock. Everyone raves about the story and the atmosphere, but man have I heard numerous complaints about how it's too short and too easy, or that's it's just your standard first person shooter. As a consumer, you have to factor in the $60 price tag for a game that will last 15 hours and you may never play again. Unless you rent, borrow, or wait for the price to go down (which can take over a year), videgames are the most expensive for of entertainment. I think from a developers perspective, they have to put gameplay over story.

merper · Oct 8, 2007

Well it doesn't even have to be co opt the story, though, does it? It's more about the world the author sets the story in. And I'm not just talking about sci fi's and fantasy here. Tom Clancy's first games, Rainbow 6 had the scenarios he outlined in the book, but it didn't really follow their story. It did use the squad mechanics that he discussed in his book, and that created the appeal. Authors establish all sorts of rules in their stories that could be directly transferred to gameplay mechanics. Weaving in the plotline is almost incidental, such as countless Star Wars games where Vader or Solo makes a cameo. It's not as direct a transfer as going from manuscript to screenplay, as someone mentioned earlier, but there's definitely new ideas that an author can provide to vitalize stale genres.

I think it story is a growing problem though, maybe not in the FPS genre so much - though it is nice to see something like Deus ex come out every once in awhile - but definitely in online RPG. If you want people to keep paying you $10-15 a month, you need to be able to immerse them in the world, and feel a sense of attachment. Part of that has to do with in-game rewards but another part has to do with story too, or, at least, the scope of development of the world.

PeeDee · Oct 8, 2007

We should give a great deal of money to American McGee and just let him keep making games. His L.A. game was hilarious.

merper · Oct 8, 2007

Interesting article I just ran across on writing an FPS game.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=79924

The site actually has more articles on writing adventure games and what not - very interesting.

Garpy · Oct 9, 2007

BioShock has restored my faith in storytelling in games. A fantastic world, a great story.

Novel to Video Game.

merper

J. R. Tomlin

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

blacbird

Garpy

keyboard monkey

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

jodiodi

Reflections of Reality

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

Prawn

Writing is finite,revising infinite

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

merper

merper

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

jodiodi

Reflections of Reality

Carrie R.

Procrastinating, clearly

lfraser

Bored and Frantic

jodiodi

Reflections of Reality

DVGuru

Plays too many video games

merper

PeeDee

Where's my tea, please...?

merper

Garpy

keyboard monkey