Reports What Is the Video Game Adaptation Curse?

By Spencer Elkind

believe it’s because movie executives and creatives will never take the medium of gaming seriously. According to all these ideas, any video game adaptation is cursed to be underwhelming and terrible.

wood. “The Last of Us” was immediately planned for both a television and movie adaptations.

which put a pause on the video game adaptation’s rise to popularity.

On Jan. 15, 2023, HBO premiered “The Last of Us,” its latest prestige television series. This show is a direct adaptation of the video game of the same name, it’s been heaped with praise from critics and audiences alike for its story, performances, and faithfulness to the original game. However, critics are bringing up another idea: That “The Last of Us” has broken the game adaptation curse. But what is this supposed curse, and why has it been brought up so much over the last few years as video game adaptations have grown in number?

The idea behind this is simple: Video games cannot be correctly adapted into other forms of media. Reasons why people believe this curse exists vary. Many think it’s because video games can be played and interacted with, an element that movies and television lack. Some argue that it’s because video games primarily aim at children and lack the mix of storytelling and characters needed for an adaptation. And some

Pretty much everyone agrees that the origin of this curse came in 1992, with the first attempted adaptation of the “Super Mario Bros” franchise. This film completely reimagined the iconic characters of Mario and his friends as people in Brooklyn, with the tagline “This ain’t no game.” Needless to say, this film was a failure and led to future adaptations of video games choosing to be completely faithful to the source material.

Throughout the rest of the 1990s and the 2000s, adaptation after adaptation was bogged down by exposition dumps, poorly executed in-jokes, and ill-defined characters. Even when forced to be completely faithful, writers couldn’t help but poke fun at the source material whenever they got the chance. It seems video games had become the laughing stock of Hollywood, and the idea of the video game adaptation curse had fully set in.

But in the early 2010s, everything changed with the release of “The Last of Us.” It is difficult to state this moment’s importance in gaming history. For the first time, audiences worldwide realized games could tell stories on the same level as television and movies and kickstarted a new era for video games in Holly-

An “Uncharted” film, considered the precursor franchise to “The Last of Us,” emerged from development hell. And nearly 30 years after the failure of “Super Mario Brothers,” Japanese game studios opened up to the idea of video game movies once again, and they began licensing the rights to Sonic, Pokemon, and, of course, Mario, to American studios for the first time in the 21st century.

It would be five years until these films were released. Until then, audiences continued to endure another round of low-quality adaptations such as “Warcraft,” “Tomb Raider,” and “Rampage.” Two films based on the “Angry Birds” franchise were released and achieved commercial success as well as some critical success, becoming some of the first video game adaptations to do so.

The first major blow against the idea of a video game adaptation curse came when “Pokemon: Detective Pikachu” was released in 2019. Films based on the Pokemon franchise were nothing new, but this was the first time one had been produced by an American studio as opposed to in-house at Nintendo. This was also the first time Pokemon had been made into live-action, and it quickly achieved success, becoming the second-highest-grossing video game adaptation to this day.

Less than a year later, Sonic finally arrived on the big screen as a feature film. “Sonic the Hedgehog” was originally supposed to release in November 2019, but the reveal of Sonic’s initial design led to universal internet backlash, resulting in Paramount Pictures pushing the release date back to February 2020 to redesign Sonic. However, that extra time proved valuable when the film was released, gaining positive reviews and high commercial success, becoming the final major blockbuster before the COVID-19 pandemic,

But while the film industry remained shuttered into 2021, Netflix decided to release something that many people consider to be the end of the adaptation curse: “Arcane.” Unlike everything else that’s been discussed in this article, “Arcane” was a television series not based on a particular game but on the lore behind the popular title “League of Legends.” Within months, “Arcane” became known as one of the greatest feats of animated media ever made, showing people that video games could succeed as television in addition to video games.

Unfortunately, 2022 proved that video game adaptations were still vulnerable. While the sequel to 2020’s “Sonic The Hedgehog” continued the legacy of the first film, other adaptations, such as “Uncharted” and a series based on the “Halo” franchise, mostly fell flat. “Halo” fell victim to the same flaws of a 2000sera video game adaptation, while “Uncharted” suffered from acrossthe-board miscasting. This served as a reminder that video game adaptations existed on a scale just like all other media. They were not all good, but they were not all bad.

Now we reach 2023, where two adaptations will shake the industry. The first is “The Last of Us,” already swimming in praise and an early Emmys contender, followed by “The Super Mario Bros Movie,” an animated film set to finally bring Mario back to the big screen under the close supervision of Mario’s creator. Regardless of what happens with these two, most would now agree that the video game adaptation curse is either broken or never existed.

On Nov. 5, 2022, Shaylian Nuerdanbieke defeated Darrik Minner via technical knockout (TKO) in the first round of their featherweight bout in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Suspicion around the bout arose after a strange movement in the betting odds just moments before the fight. According to the Lines website, “Nuerdanbieke had opened as a modest betting favorite, going off somewhere in the range of -200 with most sportsbooks. When the fight started, those odds had rocketed up to -450.” A significant line movement was improbable, considering the fight was not expected to receive much attention.

According to Matthew Holt, president of U.S. Integrity, “Abnormally large amounts of money were wagered on the under two and a half rounds (prop bet), and abnormally large amounts of money wagered on this fighter to win by first-round knockout.” The fight ended early in the first round when Minner threw a kick and dropped to the canvas, seemingly suffering a knee injury. Nuerdanbieke went on to finish Minner with ground strikes.

Suspicion about whether