Translations of television and movies into video game adaptions aren’t a new idea. Ever since Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1982 for the Atari 2600, games adapted from the screen have been a consistent direction of both movies and television series. It’s also a pursuit that has seen many mixed results, with some of these attempts being considered the worst gaming experiences of all time.

Looking back over the history of movie and television adaptions left us thinking, why is it that games based on series tend to be better received? What is it about this form of visual media that makes the translation easier, or is it that movies are, in some way, more limiting? It’s a question many video game developers must have asked themselves over the years, and it’s something we want to explore.

Series Mean Flexibility

Perhaps the biggest component that makes TV series translations into games more successful is how their storylines operate. Movies are usually based on single events, and to capture these events within a game you need to find a way to directly adapt the scenes to a gaming context. This might be difficult to accomplish, especially when you’re trying to stretch a two-hour movie into a twenty-hour game.

TV series, on the other hand, are created with the understanding of an ongoing narrative. You don’t need to adapt the events of a TV series so directly, since there’s an awareness that the characters have probably experienced many more adventures off-screen, or between seasons. Series provide much greater context for these realities, which makes them easier to adapt.

This is also the reason why when games based on movie properties do succeed, they tend to go far outside of the scope of just what a film shows. The only real exception here is with smaller titles, as with slot games like Ace Ventura Pet Detective. Since the scope of these games is small, they tend to be better fitted for movie adaptions. Of course, this also means TV series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation are strong fits for translations into casino games too, so all sides succeed here.

Films Require More Effort

There was a time when video games were so simple that any adaption was always going to look cheap and limited. Today, however, the potential of gaming is so high that adaptions can reach much higher standards. This becomes a problem if you have a big-budget film, and then you fail to achieve the same visual standards in the gaming medium.

Games which stand at the cutting edge take years to develop with a direct vision and can cost hundreds of millions to produce. Releasing a modern AAA title based on films with these criteria is a logistical nightmare, which isn’t the case for TV series. We don’t expect the same budget or standards for TV, which means lower production standards are more easily accepted. Since good gameplay doesn’t come from better visuals, this balance often pays off.

Not every movie-to-game adaption is terrible, and not every television-to-game translation is great, make no mistake. What we do have is an environment that is more advantageous to TV series, and it seems like this isn’t going to change. Besides, as more films become series, the lines between the two areas in terms of adaption difficulty become blurred, which provides more hope for the future. At least, as gamers, that is what we’d like to believe.