10 Games That Would Make Great Movies

March 31 marks the premiere of Tetris(Opens in a new window) on Apple TV. Unlike some other video game adaptations we’ve seen and cringed at in the past, this isn’t just a dramatization of blocks falling into a hole. Instead, it’s the real-life story behind the game’s development and exploitation that starts in the USSR and includes legal struggles, political jousting, and other drama. But Tetris isn’t the only game that has a wild behind-the-scenes story. Here are ten other game-development stories that we want to see turned into movies.

Carmageddon

The development team at Stainless Games, based on the tiny Isle of Wight off England’s coast, had no idea that they were making one of the most controversial(Opens in a new window) games of all time. They just wanted to have fun and create something cool. The Carmageddon’s development is rife with ridiculous stories that would translate well to film. For instance, there’s the “indestructible” Tony Taylor, who “modeled” the game’s pedestrian collisions by actually getting run over by a car multiple times. Then there’s the BBC’s moral panic about the game, which led to publisher SCI being raided by the police. I see this one as a wacky comedy with lots of gross-out stunts and big characters.

Bob’s Game

This one might be a cheat, because the game never actually came out. However, few game industry stories are quite as weird as Bob’s Game. Robert Pelloni was a one-man developer who allegedly put 15,000 hours into his Earthbound-inspired role-playing game for the Nintendo DS. One problem: Nintendo wouldn’t give him an official development kit. This decision kicked off a frenzy of bizarre behavior that saw Bob barricade himself in his room for 100 days, release names and addresses of Nintendo executives, and vandalize the Nintendo Store in New York. It’s a tragic, bizarre tale of obsession and disaster that would provide a juicy role for an ambitious young actor.

Mahjong

The solitaire version of Mahjong has been released countless times on just about every system under the sun—most notably as Activision’s Shanghai in 1986. But the first version came from one of the most fascinating figures in computing history—programmer Brodie Lockard, who created the game on the primitive PLATO network in 1981. But here’s the twist: Lockard created this pioneering piece of software while paralyzed from the neck down after a trampoline accident, by typing each line of code with a stick held in his mouth. The metaphor of Mahjong solitaire—painstakingly removing tiles to clear the field without disturbing others—would be a great narrative device to tell this incredible true story.

Half-Life 2

This isn’t a tale about the development of Valve’s seminal first-person shooter, which pushed the boundaries in narrative excellence and immersion. Instead, it’s the story of one of the most audacious crimes to ever hit the gaming industry: German hacker Axel Gembe, a game-crazy young man who couldn’t wait for Half-Life 2. So he penetrated Valve’s systems, snagged the source code for the game, then leaked it onto the Internet. That kicked off a game of cat-and-mouse that eventually led to the company offering Gembe a job interview, only to set him up with the FBI.

E.T.

This is a bigger story than one game, but Howard Scott Warshaw’s impossible quest—to create a video game for one of the biggest movies of all time in just five weeks—was the tipping point for Atari and the American video-game industry as a whole. Public reaction to this inscrutable game for the Atari 2600, along with a number of other factors, caused the gaming juggernaut to falter and collapse. This coincided with the rise in affordable home computers, which made the early-1980s consoles look prehistoric. It all ended with almost 750,000 unsold Atari cartridges being buried in a mass grave in New Mexico, which is as cinematic an image as we can imagine.

King’s Quest

PC gaming’s early days were dominated by fascinating figures, and two of the most compelling were Sierra On-Line’s power couple, Ken and Roberta Williams. Growing up in rural California, Roberta spun tales of fantastic kingdoms as a child until she met Ken as a teenager; the duo would go on to redefine computer games. Their 1980 Mystery House was the first adventure game with graphics, and they built on its success by adding rich, visual narratives in games such as King’s Quest. They would go on to see the company they built sold to another company in the mid-1990s, and both sold their stock and bailed before it was revealed that their new owner had committed massive accounting fraud.

Doom

We know there’s a cracking-good story behind the creation of the seminal first-person shooter, because David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters of Doom tells that story. The dynamic between John Carmack and John Romero—one disciplined, tech-focused, and conservative, the other imaginative, sloppy, and wild—created a beautiful fusion that defined a genre, and their split was the stuff of legends. It’s a deeply personal story that hangs on the brief period when they were able to work together, so it should be told with delicacy. A movie adaptation of Masters of Doom was floated in 2005, as well as a proposed TV show, but neither came to fruition.

Venetian Blinds

During the industry’s early days, when Atari had total dominion over the home video game market, the company didn’t treat the people that created its games all that well. That’s what prompted four of the company’s best developers—David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead, and Alan Miller—to walk into the CEO’s office in 1979 and demand to be paid royalties for their hard work. CEO Ray Kassar declined, calling the quartet “towel designers” and telling them that “anyone could make a cartridge.” The four left Atari to form Activision, but things got mean when the parent company filed suit, claiming they had stolen intellectual property: most notably, the “Venetian Blinds” technique, which let them display more-complex graphics. Crane even created a joke program by the same name to tweak Atari’s nose. It’s a great story of working people standing up to their bosses. And winning.

Kingdoms Of Amalur

One thing we’ve learned in recent years is that people love to watch scams fall apart; take the multiple competing documentaries about the doomed Fyre Festival, for example. So what could be juicier than an outspoken, World Series–winning baseball pitcher convincing the state of Rhode Island to give him $75 million dollars to fund a fantasy role-playing game, only to see the whole enterprise collapse in a firestorm of bad decisions, lawsuits, and bankruptcy? There are so many details in this one, including famed fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore writing “ten thousand years of backstory” for the game, that it could inspire a Wolf of Wall Street–style dark comedy.

Centipede

This one is an outlier on the list, because the script for it already exists. Dona Bailey was the first woman to be hired by Atari’s arcade division in 1980, and she had moved to California explicitly to work for the company. From a notebook of game ideas, she picked one about a bug moving down a screen, and with a little work, it became Centipede: the company’s second-best-selling(Opens in a new window) arcade game and the first to create a significant female player base. Bailey worked in games for just a few more years, but her contributions to the industry’s early days are significant. She has also penned a screenplay titled Sunnyvale about those years, so we’re just waiting for a studio to pick it up and run with it.

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