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With the rumors that Netflix may be making a Legend of Zelda series I want to address a sore spot among us gamers: movies based on video games. All movies based on a book or
video game seem to fall into one of two categories: "It was OK," or "I would rather peel my eyes out with a melon baller than watch that movie again," and I want to find out today why this is.
There is the obvious theory that video games are about a personal experience; that since movies are about someone other than yourself playing the movie almost seems like a badly put together Lets-Play, and I think this is true about the nonlinear video games: the Mass Effects, and Minecrafts of the world. This sort of games are all about you: what would you do if you were stranded on an infinite world? Who would you feed first if it was just you and a few other survivors of a zombie apocalypse? Do you pick the good option when speaking to a rival king? These are your options that you chose so yes is mostly your experience that video game movies take away.
But that doesn't explain why so many video game novels and comics are both very popular and critically acclaimed. This though is probably not too hard to explain: video game movies are usually about the plot of the game or something very close to the plot of the game, while the novels and comics are about side stories, origin stories, or original stories that take place in the video game world. An example of this is the Sonic comic series, the longest running video game based comic, is about finding about Sonic's friends more often than finding out more about the Blue Blur. It could also be that since the comics and novels are usually written by fans of the games the pressure is on themselves to create something that they hold dear while movie directors are more like "money money money."
