Somewhere in the South Pacific, deep in the heart of the mysterious Skull Island, a furious battle is raging. At the base of a rain-soaked river valley, a monstrous 30ft silver-back gorilla is wrestling not one, but two tyrannosaurus rexes. Despite some lethal snapping action from the dinosaurs, the gorilla clearly has the upper hand — he lifts the first and flings it fatally against a rock-face, then spins around, grabs the second Rex by the jaws and splits its head in two. Finally, he stands above the fallen foes, proudly beats his own massive chest and roars in triumph.
The scene, of course, is from the mid-section climax of the director Peter Jackson’s King Kong. The fight itself — cinematic, spectacular and action-packed — will be a giddy highlight for blockbusting movie audiences everywhere. Or at least it would, if it was actually in the movie.
Instead, this particular Skull Island rumble is from Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the video game. (You, are, Kong!) It was developed by Jackson and a team of 80 animators, designers and programmers from the French company Ubisoft, an intricate creative process that ran parallel to Jackson’s own production work on the movie itself. Thus the game has creatures, characters and plotlines from the movie, it sports the same lush look as the movie, and, ultimately, it is being promoted and sold just like the movie (two simultaneous premieres occurred in New York and LA last Tuesday, part of a massive global campaign). In short, it represents the boldest and most explicit convergence yet between the worlds of movies and video games, and hints at possible new directions for both.
“I really love how a good video game can capture your complete attention with the graphics, the immersion and the compelling storyline,” says the self-confessed gamer Jackson. “In the King Kong video game the ability for players to interact with the characters of the movie while having complete control and responsibility to make key decisions in the most intense situations is an experience beyond the movie.”
Jackson, who is currently working as executive producer on the blockbusting adaptation of the best-selling video game Halo, isn’t alone in championing a newfound enthusiasm for the pleasures of the PlayStation. Last month Hollywood’s favourite populist auteur Steven Spielberg joined with the gaming giant Electronic Arts to develop three original games for the company. The director, who previously provided EA with Saving Private Ryan gravitas by collaborating on the company’s Medal of Honor shoot-’em-up, will release his first signature game in 18 months’ time. And this week’s blockbusting screen version of the aliens-on-the-loose console classic Doom has pushed the cinema/gaming synthesis to spectacular extremes — the movie’s climax is an archetypal “First Person Shooter” slaughter sequence, with the camera functioning as the all-important character-point-of-view shot.
“Nowadays people are looking for something extra from entertainment,” says the games connoisseur Shane Walter, the director of the international digital film festival onedotzero.com, explaining the sudden rise in global gaming mania. “And gaming provides an immersive quality that’s very hard to replicate in traditional cinema.”
Thus that very immersive and illusive quality that is key to the seductive attraction of video games — the intimate and personal control of narrative action — is fuelling a video gaming market that both feeds parasitically off mainstream cinema (see the Harry Potter and Batman games, etc) and provides a consistently hungry movie industry with original raw material (see Doom).
This increasingly established and accepted interdependence between Hollywood and the gaming industry, says Walter, isn’t always a good thing. For a start, indicating a cringing legacy that stretches from the execrable Bob Hoskins vehicle Super Mario Bros to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s inane Street Fighter right through to Angelina Jolie’s vacuous Tomb Raider, Walter notes that “Hollywood has consistently tried to do adaptations of games and has usually failed miserably.”
In most big-screen adaptations, although the movies deftly borrow the visual iconography of the game, including Mario’s dungarees and Lara Croft’s pneumatic cleavage, they are hopelessly ill-equipped to tackle the Gordian Knot of gaming narrative — namely, how to turn a singular intimate interactive narrative into an effective yet passive communal experience. Here Doom’s vaunted “First Person Shooter” sequence is a telling example of narrative crisis in gaming movies. It’s visually innovative, and certainly reminiscent of watching someone fight their way through a dark and bloody level of the video game, but as such it’s fundamentally disempowering to the passive viewer — just whose game is this anyway?
Similarly, the games industry’s equally literal reliance on Hollywood as a source of raw narrative material has recently come in for heavy criticism from within its own ranks. The lazy tendency to produce sub-standard product as merchandising “support” for big studio releases such as the Fantastic Four has angered the guru-like Dan Houser, founder of the New York-based Rockstar Games, creator of the controversial market-leader Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas . Houser recently declared, in a newspaper interview that the gaming industry was currently stifled by its dependence on a stagnant and increasingly tedious movie business. “For interactive entertainment to continue to grow,” he grandly announced, “it must strive to exist beyond the limitations of cinema in general and Hollywood in particular.”
And yet, if Hollywood and gaming are such uncomfortable bedfellows, why the blatant convergence of the two? Why the interest of the movie giants Jackson and Spielberg? The answer, Walter suggests, can be summed up in a simple figure — $10 billion. That’s how much the gaming industry in America generated in revenue last year, compared to the relatively paltry $9.2 billion collected in US cinema ticket sales. It’s this commercial imperative, Walter says, that is driving out the creativity from the games industry.
“The way in which games are built now, with this incredible amount of money behind them, it’s all about franchising, and Harry Potter games, and Aliens. It’s completely commercial now, and smaller games are being squeezed out because they won’t be No 1.”
But there is hope on the horizon, and it comes in the form of an increasingly popular independent game-based movement called Machinema Moviemaking (see www.machinema.com). Here, in the bedrooms and basements of the world, far out of reach of the corporate cash cows, creatively inspired film-makers are adapting big-budget gaming engines, complete with camera moves, locations and characters, to fit their own original storylines.
Using a smattering of programming knowledge, these young turks are taking existing video games, and then graphically manipulating colours, environments and characters (sometimes even wrapping new virtual skin around existing bodily frames). After which, and using the pre-existing flexibility and mobility of characters and locations, they can create entirely new fictional dramas for their ostensible cyber-puppets.
A click here, a dash there, a couple of alpha-numericals over there, and suddenly King Kong and two t-rexes become three children playing chase in a school yard. This, says Walter, is where the synthesis of movies and games begins for real.
In the meantime, Jackson and Kong are marching their way through bedroom and box office to an assured billion-dollar fortune. The director himself is certainly unconcerned about the undue pressures of corporate commerce on his personal art, or about the immanent melding of the two media, or indeed about the future dominance of the games industry. In fact, the continued existence of two distinct and separate art forms suits him just fine. “I can’t say that I’d ever give up films for making games,” he muses. “In fact, I just did both, so why choose one over the other?”
Doom the game is available to buy for PS2, Xbox and PC. Doom the movie is out on general release on Friday. Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie is available to buy on PS2, Xbox and PC. King Kong goes on general release on December 15
