Now Playing: The Movies That Became Games That Became A Book
Now Playing: The Movies That Became Games That Became A Book
Get your hands on a true multimedia sensation.
Press Run’s latest book release, Now Playing, has arrived at the warehouse and is now available for fine people such as yourself to purchase. Spanning 420 incredibly dense pages of text and images, Now Playing sees the Hardcore Gaming 101 crew tackling a truly massive endeavor: documenting the history of every single video game ever based on a movie or television show from the 1980s and ’90s (and a few from other decades, for good measure). In addition to obvious topics like Star Wars and Jurassic Park, Now Playing also dives way into the deep end to explore truly obscure movies and shows that received a single long-forgotten media adaptation.
It’s one of the best and most exhaustive video game-related surveys ever published! We sat down with the man behind the project, co-author and editor Kurt Kalata, to learn more about this immense project.
Limited Run Games:
What's the story behind Now Playing?
Kurt Kalata:
Well, my dad was a movie projectionist when I was a kid, which is a job that doesn't really exist anymore. It was always something in my family. I worked at a movie theater when I was in high school, so did my brother.
My dad likes to support the work that I do, but he has no idea what any of the stuff that he buys is. So in the back of my mind, I was like, “This is something that he would understand.” He understands movies, not video games, but the book is aimed to a broad audience—someone who might not necessarily know all the minutiae about video game platforms, but does know movies and just might be stunned at how many of these games that they made.
He's retired now. He was a postal worker that became his day job once my brother was born, but he was still a projectionist through the ’90s up until the early two thousands or so, and even back then I asked him, can I be a projection? And he's like, this job isn't going to exist when digital comes around.
LRG:
This was not just a Kurt Kalata project, though, it was Hardcore Gaming 101. What was the process of getting all those contributors to write about movie video games?
KK:
These books take a long time and a lot of effort to put together, and sometimes it's just very overwhelming for me to do it myself. So I try to create a list of everything that's going to be in the book, top to bottom, figure out what I can do, and just sort of float around to some of the regular writers.
There are a lot of classic movies that I'd never seen before I started this project. They were rated R when I was a kid, so movies like The Godfather or Scarface or things like that I wasn't allowed to see. It was good to catch up on some of this stuff.
LRG
So everything you wrote about in terms of games—you played the games if possible and also watched the movies associated with them?
KK:
There were only two problems where we ran into technical difficulties. There's a Braveheart game for Windows 98 and a Star Wars game called Force Commander, and there was just no way I could get either of those working. For Braveheart, I ran into DRM issues. With Force Commander... there are a lot of Star Wars games that you can get on GOG or have been ported to consoles. Force Commander is one of the few that wasn't, and I think I know why. I couldn't get it running at all. Fixes for Windows 11 and 10 didn't work. The virtual machine I set up for that stuff didn't function. Everybody was just kind of throwing their arms up about this. It's a real-time strategy game with Star Wars, so you’d figure they'd be more interested in it.
LRG
I noticed in the book that there were a few games on mobile platforms and no longer exist.
KK:
That came up every once in a while. There was this Jurassic Park game that was available for a couple of months. It just came and went. It's just wild, but it happens.
LRG:
Were there any lost mobile games you were able to actually dig up through archives and get running in a virtual machine or something?
KK:
I was able to play some old Android games on my phone. There are some that are still around. I was a little nervous about getting them to work, because if this messes up my phone, that's kind of a big problem. But there was a Die Hard game that was sort of an endless runner-shooter that was not too bad. There was a RoboCop one, too, that was based on the new movie nobody likes.
LRG:
What's your general take on movie-to-game adaptations? I guess that's kind of a broad question.
KK:
They're very interesting, which is what I like to talk about at Hardware Gaming 101. A lot of these came around in the ’80s and ’90s, and that was the frontier when it came to game design. Nowadays there's very much a templated approach: This is the stuff that everybody likes, this is how we're going to approach it. Back then, they were just like, “We’re going to do whatever we can try.”
And some of these movies mapped very well, like action movies generally they made sense as an action game. Some of them didn't, and just watching them try to struggle with different things was both good and bad. I like the ones that were adapted into point-and-click games. They didn't always end up particularly great. There's a company called Capstone that was known for a lot of their licensed junk, and they made a Beverly Hillbillies game that wasn't good. There was a Wayne’s World game that was okay, but it still, it would have made more sense as a point-and-click game than it did as a platformer, which is what ended up on the 16-bit and the 8-bit consoles. So watching them try to adapt something in an interactive format was interesting.
I liked the ones that did try to experiment quite a lot with them, too. Like RoboCop, everybody thinks of the side-scrolling Data East arcade game, and most of the games were a lot like that. But there was one based off of RoboCop 3, RoboCop 3D, where it was broken up into several different segments and they were all early 3D that could run on a 286 or an Amiga. It's almost like a third-person shooter segment. There's a section where you need to fist-fight a ninja, and it plays terribly, but just the fact that somebody really put effort into making something interesting—I admire that.
LRG:
Okay, so here's the challenge round. What would you say was the best movie to game adaptation ever? The worst movie to game adaptation ever? And the best game that had jack-squat to do with the film it was based on?
KK:
See, to answer that, I’d need to have the book in front of me and spend several minutes poring through it. I mean, the best one, just the knee-jerk answer, is GoldenEye 007. That was everywhere in the late ’90s. It defined what console first-person shooters were for several years. At the time, it felt like the game was more popular than the movie. The movie was just like, it's another James Bond movie. They make those every couple of years!
For one that didn't have anything to do with the movie, I’d say Batman for NES, which was something that was probably created based off of maybe a couple of production stills, if that, and then they made their own really awesome side-scrolling action game.
LRG:
It did at least have the cathedral showdown with the Joker....
KK:
When I think of bad ones, most of them were not bad in an interesting way. There's one particularly bad Men In Black game for the Game Boy, either Color or Advance. I just remember being absolutely terrible. I'm sure there are some more interesting bad games in there. A of them are just boring, like Die Hard on the PC engine. It's just some generic gun game.
LRG:
Bruce Willis fighting through the famous jungles of L.A.
KK:
I particularly hated the NES version of Home Alone. That was one that I remember playing when I was a kid. I rented it, and even as an 11-year-old, though it was junk.
LRG:
That’s the one that's kind of a tower defense game, but bad?
KK:
Yeah. It's like you have a house, and you have the burglars chasing you, and you have these little traps. But the traps are just little boxes that you drop on the ground, and you run around in circles for half an hour.
LRG:
So kind of like a bad Spy Vs. Spy.
KK:
Yeah. On the other hand, the Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast team really liked the Master System version, which only came out in Europe. It's a completely different arcade type of game where each round is a small house and you just have to run around and avoid burglars and toss things into dumbwaiters, I think. But I visited a game shop in France and apparently that one is like 500 euros. It's one of the most expensive games in the system. I'm like, how did that happen?
LRG
Kids love their Kevin McAllister. So is this the biggest Hardcore Gaming 101 book you've put together?
KK:
As far as density and as far as how much stuff is in it, I think it's probably the biggest. Somebody asked me once how many games are in there and I'm like, I don't remember.
LRG:
Yeah. I tried counting up the titles in the index and I was like, you know what? I don't have time for this.
KK:
I have a spreadsheet that I use to create somewhere. It's a lot.
LRG:
So, final question. What should people know going into this book? What are they going to take away from it that's going to change their life?
KK:
I do hope that they gain an appreciation for some of the better and more interesting ones and just sort of the awe of some of the very strange games that like, oh, they made a game
Now Playing is available now for immediate shipping. Hardcover, full color, 420 pages, $44.99. As with all Press Run books, this is a one-time printing and will be available only while supplies last.