Silver Screen, Gold Disc

X-Striking a Blow for the Fans

As with most fan-based organizations, everyone involved with an X-Strike project is a volunteer, donating time, money, transportation, talent or just plain good will. The lack of financing is a running theme in X-Strike's work; the source material for X-Strike's first movie, River City Rumble, was chosen because it had a simple story, location and costumes. Low Budget Espionage: Project Snake, the movie that attracted the attention of the University of Buffalo's finest, ironically has the honor of being X-Strike's highest budget film, topping out at around $2,000, not counting the price of printing the DVDs.

The need to keep the bills paid and the electricity running does create some problems with production schedules, though. Filming has to be squeezed in when day jobs and real life schedules permit, so it can take as long as two years for a project to make the journey from script to finished DVD. A labor of love is one thing, but after a certain point, one has to wonder why the X-Strikers go to all the trouble. Why spend so much time, effort and money on something that so few people will ever see? After all, even if one of X-Strike's DVDs sold a million copies, a goal from which they are still very, very far, that's a mere fraction of the audience that big-budget titles like Doom and Tomb Raider enjoy, so why keep up the fight?

According to Ekkebus, it's quite simple and boils down to their love of games. "One: It's fun. Two: For the fans. Big studios are [so] preoccupied with trying to make the videogame property appeal to a mass market that they forget to cater to the fans almost at all, so what ends up happening is that the mass market doesn't go because they hear it's a 'videogame movie,' and they don't care. ... The gamers end up going and hating it because it makes a mockery of what they love."

Durham's stance is more of an irate preemptive strike aimed at the Uwe Bolls of the world: A "videogame movie can only be made once before it's ... defined as 'bad.' If we don't do it first, then the bigger studios will worry so much about making a return on their investment that they'll butcher it. That's what happens when you go into surgery with shaky hands, and that's what happens when you cast big names for no reason and neuter a story for a general audience."

As for DeMarco, his reasoning is perhaps the most pure of all. "I'll offer a list as my answer: Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, Wing Commander, House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne." Not the sort of rationale that easily opens itself up to counterargument.

Despite how it may sound, X-Strike doesn't hate all of Hollywood's attempts at marrying videogames and cinema. Says Durham, "Silent Hill worked, I believe, because [director Christophe] Gans knew which elements of the game would translate to a more passive story, and which ones would need to stay part of a game rather than a movie." DeMarco agrees, saying, "Silent Hill has come the closest in terms of capturing the essence of the source material. They captured the world of Silent Hill very well visually in the film." He still sees plenty of room for improvement, however, observing that the movie had "a very watered-down script, with some lame dialogue and storytelling. It is a step in the right direction, but there is still some ways to go."