Movie Games Suck

Tell you something you don’t know, you say? Okay. Apparently James Spawn of Hitler Cameron thinks the same thing). He makes no…well, he makes a lot of excuses about why the Avatar game was a terrible game critically and commercially, but it’s refreshing to hear someone come up with a reason besides that game developers are awful people who don’t know how to make games from this obviously thrilling source material.

Did not win for Best Movie Game

Whom did Cameron blaim? The studio, of course. John Landau, producer for Avatar and metaphoric Goebbels to Cameron’s lord of darkness, says Fox didn’t understand what Ubisoft needed to properly market the game, which is Hollywood speak for…well, he doesn’t know quite what they needed. Besides maybe a better movie to make a game out of.

Movie games are depressing because so many of my childhood favorites were movie games. Goldeneye was, in fact, a licensed game. It’s difficult to remember because it was so good, sure, but it counts. So do all the Star Wars games that I loved as a child. These were licensed games, and they didn’t suck. Movie games don’t have to suck.

So what went wrong? James Cameron thinks it’s the lack of studio involvement, but thinks that the studios shouldn’t be involved in the next breath. That filmmakers should be involved, but Avatar, a game he was involved in, was a failure according to all parties. Really, anything he offers at this point smacks of flimsy excuses about a game he was intimately involved in.

I’m not saying I know how to fix movie games, but it’s nice, sometimes, to know that developers know about as much as we do. I do know one thing, though: The Scott Pilgrim game better be totally sweet.