Trigger Happy
a hybrid future of “interactive movies,” it would be as well to take a cold mental shower by looking at what actually exists in film videogame crossover form. Disney’s Tron (1982) was the first film actively to engage in an aesthetic dialogue with videogames, arguably as a symptom of Tinseltown’s increasing insecurity about its silicon rival—for at the time, just before their first market crash, videogames were grossing more in America than the Hollywood cinema and gambling put together. Tron is still probably the best film of its kind. The shallow, primary-color fable about a gameplaying wunderkind beamed into cyberspace to do battle with an evil programmer was based around live-action interpretations of existing videogame formats (most notably the “light cycle” race), and then soon became a licensed arcade videogame in its own right.
For videogame companies, film licenses are often a sure winner. Studios generally acquire the videogame rights to a film, such as Batman, Rambo, Aliens, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and then produce a painfully substandard platform game or shoot-’em-up that might borrow a certain visual style from one or two of the film’s scenes but has nothing to do with the story line. In 1983, famously, Atari, having acquired the rights to
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