Afterword (2004)
Extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition of Trigger Happy
Over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — Sony’s PlayStation2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavily anticipated was Japanese master Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), and it represented an ultra- refined concept of the much-hyped though problematic “convergence” with cinema.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the marriage between Hollywood and videogames is an uneasy relationship at best. Since this book was first published, newer examples have only confirmed the problems. Two Tomb Raider films (2001; 2003), starring the admirable Angelina Jolie, destroyed all the dynamic, gymnastic grace of the digital heroine in a mash of fast-cut editing, while ropey computer-graphic special effects and insultingly bad scripts ensured a thoroughgoing cinematic farrago, of which the second iteration was even worse than the first. Meanwhile, Japanese videogame-makers Square spent a reported $80 million on a movie of their long-running Final Fantasy. The new-agey computer-animated feature that resulted, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was so poorly received that Square had to shut down their newly created film studio almost immediately.
By contrast, in Metal Gear Solid 2, a filmic narrative was conceived and executed within the game’s structure itself. It boasted a great number of gameplay set-pieces that were engineered with extraordinary inventiveness and attention to detail (for example, nearly every surface in the gameplay environment was represented sonically as well as visually, and Snake could alert guards by splashing noisily through puddles or clanking over gates, as well as slip up on bird droppings), but what caught most critics’ attention was the great number and extended length of the cinematic “cut-scenes”, which were not interactive but didactic storytelling interludes.
Despite the still-unsatisfactory nature of this kind of mélange of watching and playing, Metal Gear Solid 2 succeded through sheer conceptual brio. It climaxed in a riot of hugely entertaining postmodern self-referentiality and a noble if somewhat confused disquisition about genetics, memory and war. It seemed as though, in the scorched-earth apocalypse of his own private cinema, Kojima was insistent upon pushing videogames to one kind of expressionistic extreme.
Meanwhile, Rez (2001) constituted a glorious fusion of sound and vision, as the relatively simple shoot-’em-up mechanics were married to a pseudo-interactive system that altered the dance-music soundtrack according to your actions. (It was only pseudo-interactive because the sound effects invoked by button-pushes were always artificially “quantised”, ie shunted to the nearest musically relevant subdivision of the beat, in order not to create an arhythmic cacophony.) The game’s designer, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, claimed that the psychedelic artistic style was influenced by the Russian painter Kandinsky, but Rez’s vision is as much influenced by the aesthetic history of videogames themselves, as a
