It has been a long time since we got a video game adaptation that considered legitimately good, not counting the stuff that dedicated fans really ate up like Warcraft or Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, but nothing will ever stop producers from deciding that they’re the ones who will finally crack the video game adaptation code. Undeterred by the disappointing results of the Tomb Raider movie reboot, Showtime is currently working on a big Halo TV show and now Fox 21 Television is developing an adaptation of Dontnod’s recent horror adventure Vampyr. McG is attached to direct and produce the project through his Wonderland Sound & Vision studio, but it sounds like the only progress that has been made at this point is securing the rights to the game.
As early as this all is, Vampyr seems like an interesting choice for an adaptation. The game is set in 1918 and centers on a man who has been turned into a vampire. One of the main criticisms people had of the game was that various combat mechanics were lousy, which is something you don’t need to worry about in a non-interactive TV show. However, one of the best things about the game was the freedom it gave you to either suppress or embrace your dark vampiric urges (i.e., you could choose whether not to feed on people), which is similarly impossible in a non-interactive TV show.
The easy way around this would be to introduce an American Idol-style voting system, where each episode would end on a cliffhanger of the protagonist wondering if he should kill someone and then the audience could vote on what he should do. Everybody would definitely vote to drink blood, because people are sick fucks, but at least then we’d all know the guilty burden carried by these unholy monsters.