Games discover their star power

The history of movie-based video games has not been a pretty one.

Since the disastrous sales of the 1983 game "E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial" almost drove Atari into bankruptcy, it has been common knowledge that movie-license games are cheap quickies designed purely to capitalize on a film's publicity.

Last month's release of the video-game adaptation of "Peter Jackson's King Kong" caps a year that proves those days are over. Designed by Michel Ancel, a respected game designer handpicked by Jackson, the movie's director, the stylish, critically acclaimed "Kong" is not the first good game ever based on a movie. But this is the first year that a good movie-based game is more par for the course than fluke.

Some of the worst video games have been licensed from movies; "Charlie's Angels" and "The Crow: City of Angels" seamlessly integrated bad graphics with bad gameplay. Those that weren't abysmal were simply drably formulaic. Occasionally a developer would achieve success with an older movie like "Blade Runner" or "The Thing." Those two were turned into games more than a decade after their releases, but a game released concurrently with a movie was almost guaranteed to be wretched.

While a handful of decent movie-based games have turned up in the last few years, it was the critical and commercial success of "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay" last year that made people take such games seriously. Up until then, game publishers had assumed that sales depended on the popularity of a game's corresponding film, but when "Riddick" proved more successful than its cinematic inspiration, publishers came to a shocking realization: More people will play a good movie-based game than a bad one.

With the bar raised, developers are being given more time to create games and receiving more cooperation from filmmakers eager to have a good game associated with their movie.

While nothing else this year has been as impressive as "King Kong," a healthy number of fun movie games like "Madagascar " and "Batman Begins" have appeared. And after designing the tedious "Enter the Matrix" in 2003, Shiny Entertainment returned this year with the vastly superior "The Matrix: Path of Neo."

Even a bad movie has a chance at redemption through a good video game. When The Boston Globe reviewed the movie "Aeon Flux" and said its characters "would be fun only if they came with a joystick," its critic was absolutely correct--the game was far better received.

Game designers are also increasingly enamored of classic films. This year the fighting game "The Warriors" successfully recreated that 1979 street-gang classic, while "From Russia With Love" offered Sean Connery one more chance to play James Bond. With coming games based on "Taxi Driver," "Scarface," "The Godfather" and "Jaws," game designers seem bent on turning every movie they have ever seen into a video game.

Atari famously buried millions of unsold and returned copies of its "E. T." in a New Mexico landfill. A few of this year's movie-based games deserve the same fate, notably "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green," but surprisingly, most do not. For the game industry, that makes for a classic Hollywood happy ending.


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