Well, after the recent success of "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," "The Last of Us," and "Tetris," it looks like we've got our next trend. I'm not much of a gamer, but I've been around pretty much since the beginning of video games, and I'd like to put in my two cents about old games that could potentially make for some fun movies. Keep in mind that I'm not going to talk about the obvious candidates like "Legend of Zelda" and "Donkey Kong," which I'm sure are already in the pipeline. Also, there are a ton of games that have already seen adaptations in one form or another, from "Double Dragon" to "Assassin's Creed." This is a list of games that have largely left the public consciousness.
Kirby - A prime candidate for an animated film would be Kirby, the little pink blob with a big appetite. The star of thirty games and his own anime series, his staying power has been assured. However, he's a blob of few words, much like Pikachu, and might need a little rejiggering on the way to the big screen. I stress that Kirby would need to be animated, because his whole schtick of eating things to gain their powers would probably look horrific in live action.
Metroid - Samus Aran hasn't had the best time in recent years, with a couple of games that made a mess of her character. However, she was gaming's original ass-kicking female space adventurer, and had some great foes. I'd love to see the Metroids and Mother Brain in live action. I'll always be a little sad that Lara Croft beat her to the big screen, but I suspect that Samus would fare better as a screen hero because she's a much tougher piece of work.
Mega Man - The problem with Mega Man is that he's awfully derivative of other anime and game characters. His opponent Dr. Wily is inevitably going to get confused with Dr. Robotnik. Still, I always liked Rock the robot kid, especially in his cartoon incarnation. The other evil robots have a lot of potential. I'd love to see them get a shot at the silver screen. I think "Mega Man" is best suited for animation, but you could definitely make a live action version work.
Earthworm Jim - You forgot about this weirdo, didn't you? I'd honestly love to see some maniac filmmaker try to make a live action version of this with photo-real CGI, but if your hero is an earthworm in a super suit, it's almost certainly going to be animated. Earthworm Jim was a creature of his time, a Sega Genesis veteran who briefly got his own, strange cartoon series in the '90s. The absurdist, irreverent humor is a little dated, but I think it could still work today.
Frogger - Frog crosses busy street. It's an absurdly simple premise, but other characters have done more with less. The appeal of "Frogger" is that everyone knows "Frogger," even if we never actually played the game. This is one of the oldest game franchises that's still spawning sequels to this day. It's even one of the earliest to be adapted into another medium, with a cartoon version in 1983. For some reason Frogger was an investigative reporter. I guess we could do something with that?
Lemmings - This is one of the earliest computer games I remember playing, and still have a tremendous fondness for. Somehow, I associate it with Christmas, probably because of the "Christmas Lemmings" spinoffs. Again, the mechanics of the game are what's really memorable here, as there aren't any real characters. An animated adaptation probably makes the most sense, but I always thought that this would be great to do with Muppets, probably because of the box cover art.
Katamari Damacy - This franchise has a couple of things going for it - very memorable gameplay, a set of interesting characters, and an utterly deranged story involving space aliens trying to make stars by rolling up everything in sight into the katamari balls. This could be an interesting take on the usual alien invasion story. Either live action or animation are possible, but I think a live action version would have to be a horror film because katamari balls in live action are the stuff of nightmares.
A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia - This obscure NES title is something of an "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" clone, with an alien befriending a boy and going on an adventure with him. The fun part is that the alien is a shapeshifter, and will change form depending on what color jellybean you feed him. I never played the game, but the writeups in Nintendo Power magazine were fascinating. I wanted a blob to feed jellybeans to!
Bubble Bobble - The only video game I ever truly got myself addicted to was "Bubble Bobble," where a pair of baby dragons named Bub and Bob defeat enemies by trapping them in bubbles and bopping them off the screen. It's terribly cute, and I see no reason why Bub and Bob and their girlfriends and their theme music shouldn't get their own adaptation into some form of media, probably animated.
The King of Kong - Finally, we're overdue for a dramatized version of the 2007 "The King of Kong" documentary that pitted Steve Wiebe against Billy Mitchell for the world record score of "Donkey Kong," especially since the truth about Mitchell and Twin Galaxies came out a few years ago.
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