For some reason, I’ve been seeing a glut of articles telling me things that I either already know or are so obvious I should already know.
Case in point, Thomas Tull of Legendary Pictures offers this word of advice:
During his keynote speech on the second day of the Hollywood & Games Summit Tull said, “Not everything translates. Just because a movie comes out and does well, if there isn’t a good story or a compelling reason [to create a game], it is a very dangerous thing to take a brand, slap it on a box, and just say ‘Well, people will buy it.’
“If you rely solely on the brand itself, and not on the gameplay, I think that’s a mistake,” he continued.
“I have very strong feelings from the movie side… Making videogames into movies just because they have sold well is a pretty bad idea.”
I’ve played my fair share of movie tie-in games, and they’ve by and large been pretty crappy. Games like The Grinch and The Chronicles of Narnia were pretty terrible. I actually have tried to steer away from games based on movies as much as possible. Though things like the Half-Life mod for Underworld give me hope that somebody out there knows how to make a proper movie tie-in, even though the movie was pretty terrible.
Link! to article (Gamesindustry.biz).