All Our Bases Are Belong to Hollywood
Part of publishing comic books is dealing with the the occasional producer or movie studio who want to make our stuff into films or TV shows. Every time i meet one of these people they are "excited" and they "love your stuff" and "think you have a great eye for stories and properties". Kind of flattering until you realize that someone probably said the same things when optioning THIS property for film:
"Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura."
Read the entire story here at the Hollywood Reporter
Not to go all SNL on this but, Asteroids? Really? There was a bidding war over ASTEROIDS? A game with no discernible, no make that ABSOLUTELY no plot? IS the brand of an over 30 year old arcade game THAT strong? Really Universal, was this just looking like a good fit next to Candyland and Battleship (yes, both board games have been optioned by Universal)? Didn't Armageddon and Deep Impact make all the statements on big giant pieces of rock hurtling through space?
How about Pong, or about a movie about pin ball games or air hockey or Skee Ball? You can make a movie out of Asteroids but somehow a Tiki Joe is "too hard to figure out" as one person told me.
Anyway, in the spirit of things, here is a list of older arcade games I would have made into movies before Asteroids.
1) Dig Dug - little guy in some weird space suit (although not in space) and tunnels around killing underground monsters. You die if you are killed by the monsters or if a rock falls on you. Like Holes crossed with Indiana Jones.
2) Defender - A small spaceship flies around a mountainous terrain rescuing people and destroying an invading alien horde. It is kind of quaint in this day and age of video game controllers with 10-12 buttons to push that this two button and a joystick games was first thought to be too difficult. Outer space shoot 'em up, big budget action flick kind of thing.
3) Space Invaders. You all know this game, you shoot at Aliens who slowly descend from the sky/ What I remember most about playing Space Invaders was, once you got pretty good and won a lot of extra plays, the initial screen once you started again seemed painfully slow. I can't believe nobody has optioned this yet, the brand is ultimately stronger than Asteroids (whose name is so generic that I think, at first, nobody will get the connection).
4) Missile Command - So, picture this as a movie, one man survives a coordinated attack on the nation's anti-missile defense systems. It is up to him to turn back the waves and waves of missile launched by a rouge nation on the United States. ATTENTION HOLLYWOOD, STEAL THIS IDEA AND I WILL FIND YOU!
Anyway, it was a hell of a game, really worked up a sweat and one of the few arcade games that I think really got into people's heads. Missile Command was popular enough to be referenced in a recent episode of the NBC show Chuck.
5) Sinistar - Like Defender, Sinistar was an early example of what is now called a "twitch" game, something that tested the players quickness and reactions. In Sinistar The player pilots a lone fighter ship through a quadrant of the galaxy, initially blasting away at drifting planetoids to "mine" crystals and make bombs. which the player then uses to destroy the big bad
Sinistar which is being assembled off-screen by a bunch of smaller pilot ships. Once the Sinistar is assembled, it attacks and destroys the player ship. The Sinistar taunts you saying stuff like "Beware, I live!", "I am Sinistar!", "Run! Run! Run!", "Beware, coward!", "I hunger!", "Run, coward!", and a loud roar. Then it eats you. I used to love this game.
6) Joust - This is exactly what it sounds like, The player controls a knight armed with a lance, mounted on either an ostrich (player 1) or a stork (player 2), who battles waves of computer-controlled enemy knights mounted on giant buzzards. This could actually be a cool movie from a visual standpoint, a man riding a giant flying bird in a land of people who live in high mountains. I see lots of toy tie-in potential.
There you have it, I can't imagine my ideas are any better or worse than what might come of an Asteroids movie.
"Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura."
Read the entire story here at the Hollywood Reporter
Not to go all SNL on this but, Asteroids? Really? There was a bidding war over ASTEROIDS? A game with no discernible, no make that ABSOLUTELY no plot? IS the brand of an over 30 year old arcade game THAT strong? Really Universal, was this just looking like a good fit next to Candyland and Battleship (yes, both board games have been optioned by Universal)? Didn't Armageddon and Deep Impact make all the statements on big giant pieces of rock hurtling through space?
How about Pong, or about a movie about pin ball games or air hockey or Skee Ball? You can make a movie out of Asteroids but somehow a Tiki Joe is "too hard to figure out" as one person told me.
Anyway, in the spirit of things, here is a list of older arcade games I would have made into movies before Asteroids.
1) Dig Dug - little guy in some weird space suit (although not in space) and tunnels around killing underground monsters. You die if you are killed by the monsters or if a rock falls on you. Like Holes crossed with Indiana Jones.
2) Defender - A small spaceship flies around a mountainous terrain rescuing people and destroying an invading alien horde. It is kind of quaint in this day and age of video game controllers with 10-12 buttons to push that this two button and a joystick games was first thought to be too difficult. Outer space shoot 'em up, big budget action flick kind of thing.
3) Space Invaders. You all know this game, you shoot at Aliens who slowly descend from the sky/ What I remember most about playing Space Invaders was, once you got pretty good and won a lot of extra plays, the initial screen once you started again seemed painfully slow. I can't believe nobody has optioned this yet, the brand is ultimately stronger than Asteroids (whose name is so generic that I think, at first, nobody will get the connection).
4) Missile Command - So, picture this as a movie, one man survives a coordinated attack on the nation's anti-missile defense systems. It is up to him to turn back the waves and waves of missile launched by a rouge nation on the United States. ATTENTION HOLLYWOOD, STEAL THIS IDEA AND I WILL FIND YOU!
Anyway, it was a hell of a game, really worked up a sweat and one of the few arcade games that I think really got into people's heads. Missile Command was popular enough to be referenced in a recent episode of the NBC show Chuck.
5) Sinistar - Like Defender, Sinistar was an early example of what is now called a "twitch" game, something that tested the players quickness and reactions. In Sinistar The player pilots a lone fighter ship through a quadrant of the galaxy, initially blasting away at drifting planetoids to "mine" crystals and make bombs. which the player then uses to destroy the big bad
Sinistar which is being assembled off-screen by a bunch of smaller pilot ships. Once the Sinistar is assembled, it attacks and destroys the player ship. The Sinistar taunts you saying stuff like "Beware, I live!", "I am Sinistar!", "Run! Run! Run!", "Beware, coward!", "I hunger!", "Run, coward!", and a loud roar. Then it eats you. I used to love this game.
6) Joust - This is exactly what it sounds like, The player controls a knight armed with a lance, mounted on either an ostrich (player 1) or a stork (player 2), who battles waves of computer-controlled enemy knights mounted on giant buzzards. This could actually be a cool movie from a visual standpoint, a man riding a giant flying bird in a land of people who live in high mountains. I see lots of toy tie-in potential.
There you have it, I can't imagine my ideas are any better or worse than what might come of an Asteroids movie.
Comments
Mille Bornes = Deathrace 2000.
How many game related moves have not sucked and bombed out in the theaters? Very few. The only suck part is they eventually make their money back on dvd and online sales and over a period of 10 years may actually make a million bucks. But they can never give us back the dignity they stole from our little 4 and 8 bit heroes.
Just feel blessed that the best modern games are actually better produced and written than any of those films. Interactive Movies, gotta love em.
Like, no one could ever tell the story of metal gear solid 4 in anything less than a graphic novel or full length TV series. I better stop typing or my idea will drift into the ether and get snatched up by one of those Santa Monica freak shows.