Star Trek Into Darkness director J.J. Abrams was recently quoted blasting the movie’s tie-in video game, saying:
“To me the video game could have been something that actually really benefited the series and was an exciting, fun game with great gameplay”, he said. “And instead it was not and was something that I think, for me, emotionally it hurt, because we were working our asses off making the movie and then this game came out and it got, this isn’t even my opinion, it got universally panned and I think that it was something without question that didn’t help the movie and arguably hurt it”.
Now, as a hardcore Trekkie, there’s plenty of criticism I can level at Star Trek Into Darkness. The tie-in in videogame has absolutely nothing to do with it. That being said, he’s right; the Star Trek video game WAS terrible, another in a long line of video games based on films that failed to deliver. So why does this keep happening? More importantly, how do we fix it?
One of the common refrains as to why movie tie-in games fail is time; Hollywood supposedly works so fast that the video game companies can’t keep up. Mass Effect, which is regarded as one of gaming’s gold standards, was announced and released in slightly over two years, or less time it took J.J. Abrams to start and finish Star Trek Into Darkness. So, that explanation is obviously bunk.
As with most other problems, the explanation and solution are slightly more nuanced. If you look at the big name gaming studios like BioWare, Valve, Blizzard, id, Rockstar, etc., you’d notice that they’ve never taken on a movie tie-in project. More often than not, the companies that take on those kinds of projects aren’t top tier developers. As with most products, if you expect a quality end product, you have to have a quality manufacturer; Hollywood keeps using studios that are the equivalent of (or may actually be) sweatshops, so they get sweatshop-quality games. Moreover, because of the creative process, directors are frequently able to change plot details and the look of characters on the fly, which makes developing a static game rather difficult. The truth is that Hollywood doesn’t really take games seriously; they want a video game to pad their revenues and they don’t really care if it’s any good.
So, what can be done? Well, first off you have to make Hollywood give a shit about their tie-in games. Let’s be honest: that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon, so we’re probably doomed to crappy tie-in’s forever. However, in the event that there is actually someone that gives a shit, they have to detach the game from the movie. While it’s great to have the movie in theaters and game on the shelves at the same time, the fact is that the fungibility of both medium’s production schedules makes that a difficult proposition at best. Let the directors of the movie and game do their jobs.
Ideally, you want to give video game developers a universe to play in, and let them tell their own story. Take, for example, X-Men Origins: Wolverine – The Video Game. In that particular case, the video game was actually BETTER than the movie. Why? Because they gave it a fighting chance. You look at the Iron Man mods for GTA IV and you think, “Wow, why hasn’t some developer jumped all over this?” When you give the developers a fighting chance at success, and actually use good developers, you’d be amazed what they can come up with.
