Cross-Media Contamination

I first experienced the bitter taste of a poor movie tie-in when I was only eight years of age. My brother had just got the family Playstation for his birthday, and I was browsing the bargain bin of the local Electronics Boutique (yes, remember them?). Staring up at me was a game I simply could not refuse: _Batman Forever_. To a younger, more impressionable Adam Morrison, _Batman Forever_ was actually a pretty good film (Jim Carrey as the Riddler = inspired casting). Looking back, the reverse of the box should have been a dead giveaway: I’ve since learned to identify games with the blurb written in many languages as universally naff. Nonetheless, the miniscule screenshots provided held the promise of graphics that would not be seen consistently until the appearance of the Sega Dreamcast. As a result, to me, _Batman Forever_ the game seemed like a no-brainer. My father, surely less naïve than I, saw only the £1.99 price-tag and decided it was worth a punt. So began a tumultuous thirteen-year relationship between a young boy and an industry infested with dubious movie tie-ins

Needless to say, _Batman Forever_ was a huge disappointment. The screenshots were hugely misleading: those amazing graphics that I was expecting were confined to the character-selection screen (where the only choices were Batman or Robin, decisions decisions…). What I’d actually bought was a side-scrolling beat-em-up that was so poor that its unforgettable ancestor, _Streets of Rage_ was actually its superior in every department. Back in that dark summer of ’97, I blamed myself, but the intervening years have taught me a lot about how games, and movie tie-ins in particular, can defecate over the dreams of the young. I still have my copy of _Batman Forever_ somewhere, as a warning from my past self to be more vigilant with my gaming purchases.

But I haven’t been. Flicking through my fascistically-organised games collection, there are a few that I’ll skip past if I fear that someone’s watching. I have two Matrix games, _James Bond: Agent Under Fire_ AND _Nightfire_ and a distinctly average Transformers game. Sadly, these are probably the best of an insidiously mediocre bunch: the survivors from past purges when I’ve decided to take advantage of trade-in offers. I know I’m not the only one whose collection suffers from this blight, so why am I so ashamed? What is it about these games that is so embarrassing that I’ll omit them should anyone ask which games I own, or hide them should they do the unthinkable and look? My seemingly irrational behaviour can actually be rather easily explained: I’m embarrassed by these games because everyone knows how guff they are. Not only that, everyone knows why they’re so pants: games of movies are always rushed affairs, forced to time their release around the film so that idiots among us can leave the cinema itching for more of the same and willing to part with forty of our finest pounds. Then, once purchased, the games are obliged to stick so tightly to the events of their Hollywood counterparts that, at best, they amount to button-matching exercises as you watch the events of the film again; only uglier and without real people. The newest member of the tie-in club, _Avatar: The Game_, managed to be so forgettable that it’s almost impressive; and that’s in spite of a completely different story to the film, the close involvement of director James Cameron, all that lovely 3D tech and what may be the largest budget of any game ever. _Avatar_ is proof, if it were needed, that throwing money at this problem just will not cut it.

Maybe it was just never meant to be; perhaps films can’t possibly be turned into good games. Yet, the games industry runs back to Hollywood time and time again, like a chav girlfriend who turns up on Jeremy Kyle spouting ‘I know he’s bad for me but I still love ‘im’. Which begs the question: why bother? The obvious answer is that it’s easy money, but I’d like to give games developers a bit more credit. Surely no one sets out to make a bad game even if the money is practically guaranteed; people take pride in their work even when it’s embarrassingly obvious that they shouldn’t. I reckon the real reason why developers just refuse to let it go (besides the dollar signs permanently tattooed on their irises) is a game that since its release in 1997 has cast a shadow over every other attempt to make a decent film-game: _Goldeneye_. Unfortunately, most developers seem to have completely forgotten what made _Goldeneye_ great. In making it, Rare were pretty brave, because they made a good game first and then tagged the pointless film stuff on at the end. The more I think about it, the more I realise just how few of the events of _Goldeneye_ the game were in the film. It’s a good example to follow, developers are at their best when they’ve got enough freedom to actually make their games fun. Another example we could take is the excellent _Batman: Arkham Asylum_, which takes a seemingly limitless supply of material from the comics and spins an original story about them. It would seem that Batman games have come a long way since the one that shattered my naïve faith in the good intentions of my fellow man.

I wish that I could reassure you that things will change for the better but I can’t and it’s all your own fault. You just couldn’t help yourselves, could you? Those of you who helped make _Lego Batman: The Videogame_ the fifteenth best-selling game on these shores last year, now’s the time to hang your heads in shame. Anyone else may read on.

My real fear is that the cross-media disease in a contagious one, some developers are even touting it as the way forward. Ubisoft Montreal made a wonderful game in _Assassin’s Creed II_, but did we really need a series of short movies? Did we really need a book? Something tells me that when Penguin published Oliver Bowden’s ‘seminal’ work, they weren’t expecting to add it to their classics range anytime soon. I know in times of financial crisis the entertainment industries get a tad panicky, but making a book of a game (even one with as engrossing a storyline as _ACII_) is definitely over-merchandising: climbing and hiding are, quite simply, not interesting to read about. Then there’s the upcoming glut of movies based on games in the pipeline. The involvement of Jake Gyllenhaal in the _Prince of Persia_ movie and the rumour that Hugh Jackman’s in line for the role of Nathan Drake in an _Uncharted_ film suggest to me that these things are being taken pretty seriously. Let’s be under no illusions, we know why these films are being made: it’s easier to garner investment for a film when the subject matter already has a substantial fanbase. I, for one, am not holding out hope that they’ll be worth watching: the lessons of _Street Fighter, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil_ and _Final Fantasy_ films should have been learned by now.

I’m not sure it’s really possible to find a satisfactory conclusion on this issue. The first real problem is that, so long as they continue to at least break even, cross-media releases are not going to go away. I would ask you to join me in not throwing any more money on them, but I can’t even guarantee that I will (I’m probably the only person in the UK to buy the _Assassin’s Creed_ book). I’ll just leave you with the hope that in future developers will amend their priorities and concentrate on making good games. Only then should they worry about fulfilling their licensing agreements. Might require a bit of patience though, let’s not forget that twelve years separated _Goldeneye_ and _Batman: Arkham Asylum_, in my view the only two standout licensed games – not exactly evidence of quick progress.