Trigger Happy
For me, driving a touring car in a race game, I don’t want a photo-realistic car in there, I want a computergenerated car. I think it would spoil it as soon as you put a proper car in there. I think in that, the interaction between the movie and the videogame is a step in the wrong direction. These things need to be generated by a computer. Okay, you can get them looking absolutely gorgeous, with fantastic shading and all these beautiful effects, but fundamentally I’m still looking at an arcade game.
And the difference works the other way: even Bob Hoskins in a padded suit is not as lovably squat as the real Mario.
Yet even if you make your film entirely digitally, along the lines of Toy Story or A Bug’s Life, a second, major problem remains. In Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, the plot stops for ten minutes for the technically remarkable “pod-racing” scene, in which the young Anakin Skywalker races a turbo-charged hovercraft around the rocky Tattooine desert. Critics of the film complained that this was just like a videogame, but the point is precisely that it wasn’t anything like a videogame. Because the viewer is not in control. The pod-racing sequence was nothing more than an extended advert for the actual videogame that
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