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Trevor Rivers Associate Producer, GameSpot Live |
Now Playing: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Headhunter Most Wanted: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Castlevania: White Night Concerto, Grand Theft Auto: Vice (?) |
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From Pages to Your Screen
It seems like any game that's based on a license these days looks to movies, comic books, or pen-and-paper role-playing games for inspiration. While you won't hear me complain about any of that, especially if a good game is to be had as a result, I often wonder why there aren't more games based on books. It's not like the earth would split open and the skies would fall if somebody did it--it has been done before, after all. It's just not a very frequent thing.
 |  Some people may have liked this game, but I sure didn't. |
Seeing that there aren't any upcoming games based on books that I'm immediately aware of, I'm going to write about two that I'd like to see. I'm going to write about only two, because if I picked more, I don't think I could do them justice in the amount of time allowed. Honestly, though, there are so many great books that would make great games that it seems almost odd that they aren't being mined for ideas more often. Perhaps it's because they are a less visual medium than comic books and movies or aren't already games, in the case of pen-and-paper RPGs, but all it takes is a little imagination. It clearly takes a healthy portion to do a good game anyway. But let's get to it, shall we?
My first pick would be Snow Crash. This was the second mainstream book by one Neal Stephenson, a man whom many people thought might challenge William Gibson for his cybercrown. That is, until Stephenson elected to write a massive book about cryptography in WWII and the present day: Cryptonomicon, an excellent book in its own right.
|  Snow Crash. Read this book if you know what's good for you. |
|  All Tomorrow's Parties. Gibson's most recent book and one of his best. |
I choose All Tomorrow's Parties because it's a cyberpunk novel without all the hacking and cyberspace nonsense. It's a book that's grown into the world that Gibson has created, where you know all this crazy stuff is happening, but it doesn't need to be the focus anymore. Instead, it follows a few characters from his earlier books, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light, as they do the bidding of a guy by the name of Colin Laney, who was also in the Idoru. Laney is a survivor of an experiment that granted him the ability to sense and predict the flow of information. It's more complicated than that, of course, but basically Laney knows that he can change the world by sending certain people to certain places at certain times. He doesn't know much more than that, though, so the characters in the novel are sent careening around the world, appearing wherever they're told and getting caught up in a whirlwind of events. It's a great book, to be sure. The setting is a futuristic California that has been split into two states, North and South. Most of the novel takes place on the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, which was damaged by a giant earthquake and no longer takes automobile traffic. Instead, The Bridge, as it's now called, houses a large settlement of people who scorn the rest of America and have created their own mini society high above the San Francisco Bay. There are a wide variety of characters involved, from a young foul-mouthed child named Boomzilla to a mysterious Taoist assassin, a boy named Silencio, who has an important obsession with watches, and an ex-cop-turned-convenience-store-security-guard. The book builds toward a climactic ending, which ultimately closes with a strange sort of quiet explosion. A lot of people hated it because it didn't really spell out the repercussions of what had happened, but if you took a minute and thought about it, you'd realize that it was all right there in front of you.
If this book were made into a game, I'm thinking that it would be of the action adventure variety. It's got quite a bit of action to it, but there's also the "How do we get from point A to point B" aspect. If done well, it could be exciting receiving vague instructions to be somewhere on The Bridge at 12am tomorrow and then trying to get past corporate assassins to be met with an unpredictable but important event. If nothing else, I'd love to see somebody try to re-create The Bridge in a game.
So there are just two books that I think could be turned into great games. There are plenty more where they came from too--both of these authors have written other books that could be made into games. Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or any of Gibson's other books, would turn out well in the right hands, and there are hundreds of other sci-fi books that could serve well as inspiration. And that's just in the sci-fi genre. Don't forget about all the fantasy, crime, or horror novels. There's plenty of inspiration out there in the bookstores and libraries. You just need to know where to look.
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