There are a few things I’d like to see before I die, my kids get married and have kids, the sun rise over Machu Picchu, a paperback on a bookshelf with my name on it and a video game to film adaptation that isn’t ball squeezing, nausea inducing terrible. This last dream is increasingly looking like the least likely of my life goals. Especially after recently sitting through the awful Max Payne film which even the delightful European bod of Olga Kurylenko couldn’t save from meidocrity. Author John Scalzi (writer of the mind alteringly brilliant Old Mans War and The Androids Dream) recently wrote a short piece on video game adaptations which you can read here. He hits the nail on the head as far as the past crop of films go, there main issues being a lack of decent source material to turn into a movie and film pushers (lets avoid the term directors) like Uwe Boll and Paul W Anderson motivated by quick cash over quality.

The real issue isn’t just that games lack the background material to produce a good film. It’s that the games that do have decent plots and compelling characters are ignored in favour of the popular franchises. It’s our fault really, we the fans, who demand games that could never translate in any intelligent way into a film then have them taken from us and placed on a conveyer belt into a big clunky, loud device called ‘the hollywood machine’ and what comes out the other end isn’t what we wanted or even asked for. We get a Street Fighter movie featuring a white American girl as Chun Li, a Hitman movie where Agent 47 is an orphan instead of a clone or an Alone in the Dark film featuring orange skinned celebrity drunk Tara Reid. There’s an aggressive campaign to get a Zelda movie made that has been pushed on the internet for a long time. But really? Zelda? I’ve enjoyed several of Link’s adventures over the years as much as anyone, but I never played the games for the plot. Does no one remember the Super Mario Brothers movie?

It isn’t that games are lacking in the right elements of plot. Mass Effect contains enough dialogue and events to make a trilogy from the first game alone, Bioshock has a visual style and intriguing twist that begs for the big screen and dozens of other games such as Resistance and God of War have the kinds of sweeping (albeit sometimes unoriginal) plots that could be easily transformed into a summer blockbuster. Lets do the list then: Street Fighter (two films and counting plus an anime TV show), Mortal Kombat (again why two films?), Resident Evil (three films that had nothing to do with the game), Dungeon Siege, Doom, Wing Commander, Dead or Alive. All complete crap, although Dead or Alive gets a pass for being self mockingly bad. For a full list click here courtesy of wikipedia. Scan that list and point to one film that isn't lunch losingly bad.

It also isn’t that the games are impossible to make into movies. Over the last few years Robert Rodriguez, Zac Snyder and Peter Jackson have each proven that supposedly unfilmable comics and books can be made into good films. These are creators who have proven that with the right combination of talent, timing and technology you can make anything. But these are also creators who are fans, people who have dived into the evil hollywood machine and kept tight hold of their project as it was pushed through the gears and grinders before emerging at the other side, exhausted, oil stained, but clutching the movie they think the public deserves. We were close once, in hushed tones people still speak of the fabled Halo movie. The one to be produced by Peter Jackson and to be directed by his protégé Neill Blomkamp. Click through to watch Alive in Joburg; it’s only a short made for almost no budget at all but it’s what caught Jackson’s eye and convinced him Blomkamp could direct a sweeping space war film. This was it; this was the Holy Grail, a good movie, based on a popular franchise. Unfortunately the studio had no faith in Neill Blomkamp and wanted another director. So Jackson walked and took his replica Warthog with him.

Why do we want movie adaptations of our games in the first place? Do we crave some mainstream validation of our favourite games? I hope not, because personally I don’t want mainstream validation; that’s when the hollywood machine will really turn its beady, hungry eyes on gaming and if you think the amount of shovel ware on sale today is bad, just wait. Do we want people to walk out of the cinema and head straight over to their nearest game pawn shop and pick up the title for their PS3? If that’s your reasoning for wanting a movie based on your favourite game then frankly you’re a fanboy, so you can take your Metroid Prime movie petition and shove it. We should want movies based on the games we love because we should want our world to be expanded. That’s the final key, the final piece to the puzzle. The movie based on Killzone or Castlevania should take the exisitng universe and build on it, not try and recreate the story of the game or change it completely to fit in with some perceived template for films or some coked up directors 'vision'. Just as the books and comics do for Halo and Warcraft, the movies should make the game world a bigger and richer place. As an added bonus this way you can make a good movie and make the fans happy. Ironically some of the best game films are shorts created by fans such as the Half Life short film series Escape from City 17.

The future isn’t looking very bright. One of the biggest upcoming movie projects is an adaptation of Metal Gear Solid that may or may not be directed by Kurt Wimmer (one point for Equilibrium, minus one for Ultraviolet) and may or may not be written by David Hayter (Xmen 1 and 2 and Watchmen). The bad news is they are planning on basing the movie on Shadow Moses, the story from the first game; I all ready feel sorry for the poor actor who has to deliver Liquid Snakes cringe inducing dialogue and are they actually going to have the hot/cold morphing key cards? It also apparently has the fumbling hand of Paul W Anderson on it. Other titles that may or may not continue the tradition are Prince of Persia starring Jake Gyllenhal and Bioshock to be directed by Gore Verbinski from Pirates of the Caribbean. Expectations are high with these two films attracting some moderately interesting talent. It might seem like a good movie based on a game is a pipe dream but not long ago people said we’d never have a decent Batman film. We just need to hit that sweet spot, those three T’s, talent, timing and technology. It might also help if someone in Germany changed the tax laws so we could push Uwe Boll out of business. Now there's a dream we can all believe in.