Video Game Movies Ipso Facto

We just talked about the troubled history of movies based on video games. Apparently the converse is enjoying something of a heyday:

Hollywood licenses did well in the vidgame world over the holidays, as Activision and THQ had strong quarters fueled by movie-based games.

Activision reported record revenue in the 2004 holiday quarter, third on its fiscal calendar, driven in part by sales of its "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" title, which sold more than 1 million units. It continued to receive strong performances from the earlier released "Shrek 2" and "Spider-Man 2."

...

Meanwhile, competitor THQ had an "Incredible" holiday quarter of its own, due primarily to bigger-than-expected sales for its adaptation of the Pixar film.

Selling more than 4 million units of its "The Incredibles" game, as well as more than 2 million of its "SpongeBob SquarePants Movie," THQ beat expectations, and grew revenue 37% to $400.3 million. Net income more than doubled to $62.9 million.

Variety.com - Vidgames based on pics lift bottom lines [expensive reg. req.]

Needless to mention, most of these were franchises -- already books or comics before they were movies. Read more...And just a caveat -- I haven't played any of them. I do remember back in the original NES days, through the N64 days, that franchises did not always make for good video games. The classic example is from the Atari days:

Onion: So that brings us to E.T., which, for better or for worse, is probably what you're best known for.

Howard Scott Warshaw, head Atari designer: Yars' Revenge is consistently rated one of the best games of all time. And E.T. is consistently rated one of the worst games of all time. That means I have the greatest range of any game designer in history.

O: So assuming E.T. really is the worst game, how did that happen?

HSW: Atari was negotiating the rights with Spielberg. They waited a long time to do that. It was 1982, and they were negotiating well into July. Toward the end of July, they finished the negotiations, and they paid an inordinate amount of money for the rights to E.T., more than they could probably realistically hope to make from the game.

O: Wasn't it something like $20 million?

HSW: It was over that, it was like $22 million. So at the end of July, around July 27 or 28, I get a call saying, "Hey, can you do E.T. in, like, five weeks?" No one had ever done a game in less than six months or so. They needed someone who could do the game really fast, and Spielberg wanted me to do the game, because he liked me, and he thought Raiders was cool, and he liked Yars' Revenge. The people, the managers, thought that nobody else could really pull it off. They came to me, and I sort of held them up, said, "Yeah, I can do a game in six weeks, if we make the right agreement." But, to me, it was a great challenge. I liked the idea of this huge technical challenge, to try and produce a full game in six weeks. Actually, it was five weeks. It was the end of July, and it had to be ready on September 1. Because to make the Christmas season, it would have to go into production by September 1, and they did not want to miss that Christmas season. So I did what I could. I tried to design a game that could be done in five or six weeks. It wasn't like I borrowed a lot of stuff or rehashed a lot of other things; it was all original code and graphics that I put together. I just worked my ass off for five weeks and made a game. I got a bunch of signatures in it, and a whole bunch of things. Yeah, it's got some problems. If I'd had another week or two to work on it, it may well have been a much better game. But for a five-week effort, which is what it was—about 35 days that I had to work on it, including the design—it's a hell of a game.

O: Is the landfill story true or false?

HSW: I say false.

O: You don't know definitively, though?

HSW: I don't know if anybody knows definitively, because I doubt that it happened, so nobody can really know. I have a reasoning for it. At the time this was going on, Atari was in huge financial trouble. Atari's a company that goes from the most explosive and successful company in American history to the fastest-falling company in American history. They went from, like, nothing, to $2 billion in sales, in just a couple years, and then the next year, they lost money.

O: It can't all be the E.T. cartridge, right?

HSW: Oh, no, no, it's not the E.T. cartridge. Atari, for years, was using the leverage that they had to just screw distributors everywhere. When they had a hot game, they would force distributors to buy copies of the old games that weren't selling anymore, just to get copies of the new game. This is the kind of stuff they were doing. So when things started to turn on them, everyone in the industry was waiting to jump on them with both feet. That's what killed Atari, was the ill will that they had generated through their cutthroat business practices on their way up.

Howard Scott Warshaw, Interviewed by The Onion AV Club