When Movies Did This, Games Did That

Have you heard of Portal 2? Surprisingly, for what is effectively an esoteric puzzle game, you might have.

The developers, Valve, have promoted it heavily having had little success finding an agency that understood the game.

No one knows the product better than the people who made it. We’ve had many creative kick-off meetings with agencies over the years, and you’d be shocked by the treatments that have come back. Copycat treatments. Cliché treatments. Treatments that reveal the agency weren’t listening in the initial meeting."

The really interesting thing about Portal 2, though, is the humour. The original game, Portal, was funny, but as this review highlights, where "Portal was a sequence of great jokes, Portal 2 is that rare beast, an actual video game comedy – and one of the funniest ever".

Comedy in games has a good history. The wave of point-and-click adventure games from LucasArts in the 80s and 90s was filled with humour. Then, as games changed from 2D to 3D, the comedy was seemingly lost in a race for graphical fidelity. Luckily for us, though, Valve appears to place a high value on writing.

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing something I've been thinking about over the last few weeks. Having spent a enjoyable month reading Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts I've been excited to start drawing some historical lines between movies and games. When movies did this, games did that. So if this is a high point of comedy in games, what are the movies up to?

For the most part, it's a year-long summer of sequels. Cars, Transformers, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Happy Feet, Mission: Impossible, Sherlock Holmes and so on. But on the other hand, it's a year of impressive story-telling in the form of Source Code and The King's Speech. Fewer exceptional films but that's expected, right? Or it's a year of remakes like Tron, True Grit and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

So far, then, in 2011 we can say that the film industry is making an incredible amount of big-budget films, compared to the games industry, which is making an incredible amount of casual/indie games like Tiny Wings, Orbital and Coin Drop, but only a very few big budget, AAA, games.

Or rather, in 2011 when movies did all this, games did that: