John Minson

With cinema admissions growing again, after many years of decline, software houses are cashing in on the smashes. After all, the movies are still a mega-bucks industry, besides which computer games are fairly small-fry, so it makes sense for them to take a lesson or two from their millionaire cousins in the world of entertainment.
    Rachael reckons that what she looks for in a movie is human involvement. You have to believe in the characters and have sympathy for them, or you won't care a damn about what happens to them (see her review of Bellman And True in Street Life for further details). She wants believable characters... oh, and lots of car crashes, gunfire, gallons of blood and hunky males!
    Well, while the latter lends itself to computer-isation, the former is more difficult to catch. I love Woody Allen and really get into his New York humour, but I can't quite see Hannah And Her Sisters - The Computer Game (what you have to do is shoot down the neuroses).
    Perhaps the only way to get inside the total movie-experience is via the adventure. Does anybody out there remember Gremlins, which followed the film extremely closely? You were placed in the difficult position of having to cope with a town overrun by the little monsters - a good, original adventuring scenario.
    But unluckily adventures remain a minority interest and tie-ins don't come cheap. To pay for the license on a big movie, a software house needs to know it can score chart-topping sales. So it's cheaper, and safer, for adventure publishers to stick with the tried and tested formulae which they know appeal to their loyal regulars.
    Not so the arcade merchants. They know that a top selling game will easily cover the cost of a license. So they look for titles which contain enough action and adventure to keep you jiggling your joysticks - and which look like they'll be such big successes that you'll have to buy them. The movie becomes a 100 minute mega-advert!
    It all started way, way back when Activision scored a considerable coup by snapping up the micro-rights to (Who ya gonna call?) Ghostbusters. To be honest, the game itself wasn't that hot, but the catchy theme music kept everything tapping along quite nicely, and it sold in its hundreds of thousands thanks to the worldwide success of the original.
    

From then on there have been tie-ins with the good, the bad and the box-office flops. Anyone remember Biggles - The Movie? You had to be quick to catch that one at your local flea-pit, and vicious rumours abound that Mirrorsoft's game did better than the mess of time-travelling-air-ace-meets-modern-London-punks that it was based on!
    Everyone has their favourites though. I always reckoned that, in terms of outright accuracy and faithfulness to the original, Death Wish 3 got it right. Shoot everything in sight without a care for whether the muggers came from broken homes and deprived inner-city areas. Let's face it, the computer game contained just as much emotional depth as Michael Winner's slay happy original.
    But how do you choose a movie to convert to a computer game? What makes a good movie, after all? In the quest for an expert answer, did I phone Barry Norman at the Beeb? No! Instead I probed Rachael J Smith (Gwyn wasn't around at the time!) because she was sitting next to me in the pub. Anything for the easy life. (So we've noticed. - Ed)
    

This sort of thinking can come up trumps - but all too often it leads to the tail wagging the dog. Imagine you're a game designer and your phone rings. "This is Money-soft. We've just snapped up the rights to Invasion Of The Mega-Dodos Meet Bambi and we want you to do the game. Oh, and we need it next Thursday in time for the premiere."
    Now you're not going to turn down all that lovely lucre, are you (come on, be honest?) But ask yourself - is your heart really in it? Are you going to wrack your brain for weeks, trying to find a way of keeping that tender sub-plot about Bambi's unspoken love for Thumper?
    Of course you're not. You've not got the time, anyhow. You're going to concentrate on the effects-filled finale, where the cute little deer straps itself into the star-fighter and blasts the Mega-Dodos to extinction! And maybe, if you have a free second, you'll wonder why you're churning out such crud when you've got this idea for a really innovative new action-strategy game - only nobody will back it!
    The all out action approach can work okay. Take Star Wars, the arcade machine, a million imitations, and finally the official license from Demark. All that tower shooting and trench flying is obviously well-suited to the computer.
    But what do you really remember about Star Wars? Sure the effects are impressive, but they wouldn't be anything other than scale models and Special FX without Luke's rivalry with Solo for Princess Leia, and the comedy of R2-D2 and C3-PO. The game can only really scratch the surface.
    Platoon, the movie, is about the hell that was Vietnam, not eliminating the enemy as if they were worthless sprites - which is, of course, all that they are on your micro. I can think of very few games that have been wholly true to the spirit of their originals.
    

Back To The Future tried to be slightly innovative and failed dismally. Aliens fared rather better, though I'm not talking about the Activision releases. Instead I preferred the old Mindgames version, now available on Bug-Byte, a strategy game which was little more than a board game, but it cranked up the suspense.
    The best tie-ins I've seen recently don't have anything to do with the latest top-releases and won't even run on the Spectrum. They're both from the aptly named Cinemaware for the Amiga and ST and based on films from the 1940's. Where The Three Stooges and Rocket Ranger score, is in attention to detail and original gameplay, which is true to the spirit of those slapstick comedies and cliff-hanger serials. There's a lesson in there for Moneysoft and its ilk.
    If software houses really want to develop successful movie tie-ins, they'll have to sit down and analyse how to recreate whatever the film made them feel in the first place. Otherwise they'll carry on churning out tacky souvenirs which you're bored with within the week. And when that happens you'll show them what you think in terms that they understand you'll stop buying their titles and spend the money at the cinema instead!