From Unlicensed to Transmedia: Trends in the Historical Poetics of Film-to-Game Adaptation

Film licenses have been an important industrial factor in the development of commercial videogames due to the cross-promotional opportunities presented when making a film-to-game adaptation. This paper examines the history of film-to-game adaptation paratexts, considering four periods via the aesthetics and cultural contexts of significant games from each period in an effort to
articulate trends throughout game history.

The earliest film-to-game examples were unlicensed adaptations loosely based on film properties which relied on name recognition of the original film’s title such as Atari’s Shark Jaws (1975), capitalising on the success of Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), and Death Race (Exidy, 1976) based on Death Race 2000 (Bartel, 1975). Historically, the film-to-game adaptation has been associated with intrinsically poor quality with the infamous case of the ET: The Extra Terrestrial (Atari, 1982) game setting the pattern of disreputability for all future console generations. The second period is best exemplified by the prolific UK-based development company Ocean Software and their 8-bit formulaic side-scrolling platform adaptations of the films Platoon (Stone, 1986) and RoboCop (Verhoeven, 1987). The next significant development in the history of film-licensed games was the early attempt at transmedia storytelling with Enter the Matrix (EA, 2002). Lastly, the Lego film adaptations (such as Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (LucasArts, 2007)) demonstrate, “how abstraction may be mobilised to facilitate the often-problematic translation of cinema characters into video game characters” (Aldred, 2014).