Clockwise from top left: Stardew Valley (Image: Concerned Ape), E.T., Doom, and Night Trap
This week, Apple TV+ is releasing Tetris, the dramatic true story of the development, and importation, of one of the most successful video games of all time. Starring Taron Egerton, the film already made a splash at SXSW, selling audiences on its blend of ingenuity and Cold War thrills. It also, as it happens, opens a whole new avenue for the increasingly lucrative world of video game movies, i.e., ones not just based on the games themselves, but based on the dramatic stories that sometimes underpin their development.
Which got us thinking: What other true stories from the world of game are ripe for this sort of adaptation? We are, after all, talking about both a multi-billion-dollar industry and one of the most recently developed artistic mediums in human history: Surely there’s more to the dramatic possibilities of gaming’s behind-the-scenes world than a handful of falling blocks?
Hence these suggestions: 5 other real-life game creation stories that could get audiences hooked just as much—and, in a few cases, even more so—than the actual games they produced.
E.T. (1982)
Screenshot E.T.
Genre: Animal House party vibe … turned Behind The Music “and that’s when it all went wrong” momentIt’s quite possible that no video game company in the entire history of the industry has been as ready-made for cinematic debauchery as Atari in the 1970s and 1980s, when the California-based company was reportedly a haven for young counter-culture types who’d stumbled into an unlikely license to print millions upon millions of dollars for themselves. (There have even been allegations that these young, extremely cash-loaded computer nerds may have spent some of their earnings … on drugs.) But nothing contrasts a great party movie like an eventual plummet, and few things have ever plummeted harder than the video game market crash of 1983. Atari’s infamous licensed E.T. game was, by no means, the sole instigator of said billion-dollar, industry-wide collapse. But the story of its development—including developer Howard Scott Warshaw being given just five weeks to develop the game, after kludging together a pitch that would pass the smell test when presented in person to Steven Spielberg himself—is rightly the stuff of bad video game legend. You even have a ready-made final image: The New Mexico landfill where so many copies of the game were ultimately buried, only to be resurfaced by the curious (and ) many years later.
Night Trap (1992)
Screenshot YouTube
Genre: Congressional thrillerWe don’t know for certain that the 1993 Congressional hearings on video games, organized by Senator Joe Lieberman, are the only times the U.S. Senate has ever concerned itself with the filmography of the late Dana Plato. But it was certainly the most prominent: Two hearings, focused on the “issue” of violence in video games, and spurred on by the use of live-action footage in games like Mortal Kombat and the Plato-starring FMV schlockfest Night Trap. There’s lots of opportunities for legalistic grand-standing and moralizing for our stars in this little story, as various ethical champions stand up to decry the cruel violence of trapping cartoonish vampires with a bunch of trap doors. Meanwhile, there’s a ticking clock element, too, as video game industry bigwigs race to come up with a ratings system that could be in place before the government instituted one of its own—the origin story for the modern day ESRB ratings that exist on every mainstream game.
Genre: Corporate buddy comedy turned corporate horror storyThis one is a bit of a cheat, in so far as David Kushner’s 2003 book Masters Of Doom—the story of id Software masterminds John Carmack and John Romero, and their massively influential impact on gaming—has been kicking around as an adaptation, trapped in development hell, for years at this point. (The book was most recently optioned as a TV show, although there’s been no word about any forward motion of late.) It’s not hard to see why, either: Carmack (the introverted technical perfectionist) and Romero (the charismatic game design guru) make for fascinating foils for each other, both during id’s meteoric rise on the back of their genre-defining hit Doom, and then as each man drifted off in their own direction, never quite achieving the same level of artistic success individually, as what they’d built together.
Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning (2012)
Image Electronic Arts
Genre: Adam McKay-style dark business comedyThe irony is that the story of baseball star Curt Schilling—a noted fanatic for early massively multiplayer online role-playing game Everquest—taking his baseball millions, trying to make his own game studio, and ending up in a , is easily as compelling as the actual story of 38 Studios’ only game, Kingdoms Of Amalur. (Which wasn’t even the game the studio was supposed to be making; Schilling grabbed the project, and existing developer Big Huge Games, as an easy stepping stone toward the incredibly ambitious MMORPG his teams were actually hired to create, but never did.) As recounted in books like Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, the rise and collapse of 38 Studios had devastating effects on the lives of the people who bought in to Schilling’s dreams. But it’s also a fascinating look at both the power and the price of hubris, as a guy who rose to the very top of one field looked at another, figured, “Hey, I can do that”—and then came crashing down in the process.
