Of course, there's reason, good hard technological reason, for this state of affairs. But if you're not a developer you probably don't know the why. When a studio executive gets his hands on a game, he's getting a product that seems like it has little respect for verisimilitude. That makes it's quite easy for him to just blow the whole thing off - canon, backstory, characters - and just use the name and make a movie he thinks will bring in the fat bucks. I mean, Lara Croft's just a brand, right? I mean Lara Croft®. And game makers have, so far, not succeeded in making the case that more is at stake - that character, story, canon, verisimilitude matter when making a movie about a game.
But you know, we can't just blame the game developers, either. After all - who is playing the games, and who is going to see the movies made about the games? As I said earlier, hardcore fans are actually an easier audience with lower expectations of verisimilitude than the mainstream. They don't get all that bent out of shape about absurd plot holes and ridiculous exceptions to pre-existing canon. They'll deploy retroactive continuity adjustments at the drop of a hat to make it all fit. They'll spend ten minutes running around a stupid six-foot polygon that our hero somehow can't cross. They bark, but they don't bite - they go see the stupid movie.
So next time I'm sitting in a theatre on opening night, having waited in line for two hours to get the chance to be the first to see a terrible movie made from a great game, the first thing I'll do is blame the marketers. The second thing I'll do is blame the developers. And the third thing I'll do is blame all you people around me for encouraging the studios to make this crap. Damn fan boys.
Max Steele is an enigma wrapped inside a riddle. When not actively being mysterious, he passes his time manipulating time and space to fit his plans for world domination.
