Movies based on video games has always had a rocky relationship. Which can be seen in earlier flops like Bloodrayne or the now 21 year old adaptation of Mario. As Hollywood continued to churn out flops, internet discourse communities relating to video games decided to take matters in their own hands. I’d consider early ones would be the webisodes of Red Vs Blue is when the gaming community took matters into their own hands. This is when gaming denizens started to take the element of play and make entertainment out of it. The electracy of of social media at the time of red vs blue was not much when it came out. Web videos based on games during this time gained popularity based on their real life friends who tol each other to watch it. As opposed to know where your friends on social media sites or even MMO communities will tell you to watch something. Fans started to hunger for more than just short flash videos or screen captured game play with voice overs. They wanted real movies. One movie that spawned from this was a completely fan made Zelda video. on a truly shoe string budget of around 4,500$. But was quickly shut down by Nintendo only after they made it. Again showing nintendos reluctance towards fan made videos. Luckily it was re released later for everyone to view. Another one comes to mind is the fan made short of Portal which I’ve embedded below.
During this period of 2007 to now video games story lines have matured much and the fan communities also have wanted more tools at their disposal. Which led to Valve creating the program called Source Film maker. Which lets you create shorts or movies using all their ingame assets and animations. Which makes machinima films much easier to create. They become more and more like interactive films, much to my pleasure, but to other dismay. Video games are becoming much more than just hack and slash beat’em ups.If electracy is the logic of images, than video games have slowly started becoming more acedemically viable in terms in literacy and story telling. If electracy is only images, then what would the essence that is play for video games be? This led to Hollywood once again considering video games as a good source of movie material, as they found with comics recently. This led to many studios pursuing to create video game movie based off of many of these type of movie games. Such as The last Of Us, Uncharted Drakes Fortune, Assassins Creed, and the lore heavy World Of Warcraft.
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