Movie-based games and game-based movies don’t exactly have the greatest history, and yet both continue to be made. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer believes his Prince of Persia movie will break the trend of bad/mediocre game-based films, when it debuts next month. Ultimately, no matter how successful the game franchise has been, the movie’s got to have a great story. Thankfully, Bruckheimer could look to series creator Jordan Mechner for that.
“I think having him as a guide on the first screenplay was an enormous help. He avoided all those pitfalls — what story to follow and what to do,” Bruckheimer said in a Gamasutra interview. Also, we brought in this guy named David Bell, who is the foremost parkour instructor. He was really instrumental in creating some of those moves and action sequences.”
When going in the opposite direction (movie-based games), the process can be equally challenging. James Cameron’s Avatar was absolutely huge, but Ubisoft’s game largely failed to move the needle.
“Here’s the problem. The problem is, to really make a good game, it really takes a long time. So by the time you greenlight a movie, it’s a year to a year-and-a-half until it’s out. That’s too short a period for a video game to be made. It’s a three-year process to get a really good game made, and that’s where they fail,” Bruckheimer noted. “What the studios do is that they have this business model where they know they’ll sell X amount of games on that opening couple of weeks, and a lot of them do that, rather than take their time and create a wonderful game. So what if it comes out later on DVD or something like that As long as it’s a good game, people will play it.”
