They do it to books too. Have you seen Flowers in the Attic? What a piece of tripe. Hollywood always thinks they know better than an author or writer. They suck like that. Unless someone is JK Rowling and can pull the deal of the century, then Hollywood is gonna screw it all up somehow.

I just want more musicals.

GREAT article, Jay.

I would love to see the video game writers be given a chance to turn their own games into movies.

And you're so right about the games telling better stories than movies, though I'm torn on that because sometimes I get frustrated with games when their is, in my opinion, too much emphasis spent on the storytelling and art and not enough on the actual gameplay.

Rockstar did a pretty good job with The Warriors. They made an entire backstory to the movie that led right into a pretty faithful telling of the original. Plus a lot of gratuitous violence, of course.

I wonder if the guys making video games could really make a good film. Possibly, but very possibly not.

The real key is to get an actual filmmaker who knows and appreciates a game with a good story to make a good film out of it.

I think the reality with adaptations is, more often than not, the person who made the original art is not who should be making the adaptation. For instance, I think there are few authors out there who can successfully translate a great book they wrote into a great movie script. They're just two very different artforms.

The problem is that shitty filmmakers are hired to try to turn these great works of art into movies, but they make a shitty movie because that's what they do no matter what kind of source material you get.

So again, it comes down to finding the right filmmakers. Peter Jackson with LOTR is a prime example. Or how about the movie version of Contact? I thought that was pretty good, and it used the book while still realizing what kind of changes needed to be made to make it a successful movie.

It seems like they had the right idea with the movie version of Halo, having hired Peter Jackson and other good people to help produce it, but that seems to have fallen through, unfortunately.

I think ultimately, though, it comes down to a need to lock Uwe Boll up in a dungeon somewhere and never again let him out. Or at least have a long, violent talk with whoever the hell it is who keeps funding his godawful movies.

I think a game company could do a good job, but true, getting a REAL filmmaker behind it is essential. I used to own the rights for a game property called "Mechwarrior", and in that case the rights holders were insane. They just had no idea. I seemed like a home run project, but the things that can go wrong are numerous. The key is getting people outside the hacks in the studio system on a project and making it as faithful as possible, without falling into the pitfalls of studio films.

Its a slippery slope, but I think now that the game industry has come as far as it has, its time they tried. They should be hiring people out of film school and creating entire film divisions with the end game already in mind. Bring the filmmaker up in the culture of your product, does that make sense?

Creating film divisions and sort of grooming filmmakers out of school, I think, is a great idea. I don't know if it would work great or not, but I'd be really intrigued to see the results of it. I think it would definitely have the potential to bear some pretty fascinating fruit.

Considering the huge gaming culture, as well, I think a project done that retains some of the unique atmosphere and storytelling of videogames--basically, what you wrote about in the article--could make a huge killing financially, as well.

So yeah, I'd love to see the results of something like that. The question is, would any game company with the resources to pull off such a project actually want to take on the financial risk?