How novels, literary sagas and stories have been adapted to the video game, thanks to which they have expanded their universe.
International Book Day is celebrated on April 23, in commemoration of the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. Although it is not entirely true that the death of both writers occurred on the same day —Cervantes died on the 22nd and was buried on the 23rd, while the Gregorian calendar had not been instituted in England when the bard's death was confirmed—, yes We attribute to them the origin of a festival in which the love of literature is celebrated. Coinciding with Sant Jordi Day, the gift of books – and roses – to our loved ones has become a healthy practice for the cultivation of our minds. Likewise, reading is one of the shelters, along with video games, that make quarantine more bearable. But what does literature have to do with digital leisure? Both media maintain a close relationship. Just as we find transmedia titles that have transcended paper to explore their lore —Dragon Age, Assassin's Creed, God of War—, we also find several video games that were born from a novel or literary saga, and whose story we will tell you today, as well as some time ago we told you about some writers who were involved in the video-play adaptation of their own works.
The textual adventure: interactive literature
The inspiration for video games in literature goes back to the very origins of digital entertainment. With the arrival of computers in the home, digital entertainment was introduced as a form of consumption that presented the computer as much more than a work tool. Just as educational video games were intended to create a family space where a more accessible face of technology was displayed, textual adventures emerged as the predecessors of graphic adventures, invented by Roberta Williams, who incorporated images and interaction with them.
Infocom was one of the most prolific developers in the genre. Very similar to the game books, the textual adventures presented a situation that the player had to solve by writing the actions he wanted to perform: "open door", "turn left", "take ring". One of his best-known works was the adaptation of The Galactic Hitchhiker's Guide, in which Douglas Adams himself, author of the homonymous literary saga, collaborated. Steve Meretzy, one of the developers at Infocom, described to Arcade Attack what it was like to work with the writer, whose lateral thinking was very enriching for the creative process: “(He could think of) things like making the game lie to you, having a inventory item that was "no tea" or enter a parsing command failure that will take you to a wormhole and start an intergalactic war. Things that never occurred to me. ”
Infocom's Galactic Hitchhiker's Guide video game
Other classics of fantasy, adventure and science fiction literature were taken to textual adventures and some of them went on to include in-game images, such as The Hobbit, Don Quixote de la Mancha or Treasure Island.
The graphic adventure: novels, puzzles and inventory
The transition from textual adventures to graphic adventures took digital entertainment to a new level. In this new genre, Paco Menéndez and Juan Delcán made a revolutionary title in the history of the Spanish video game: The abbey of crime, adaptation of El nombre de la rosa, a novel that inspired Menéndez to design a title that was groundbreaking in terms of graphics thanks to its isometric perspective. Delcán narrated in El Diario.es how his companion managed to instill a life of his own to the secondary of the game thanks to artificial intelligence: "The monks did things that he himself did not expect, and he spoke to me about them as if they were people who existed. having given them artificial intelligence, they became like Pinocchio, they were real creatures that he spoke to me with and that he lived with. ”Unfortunately, due to copyright issues, they had to adapt certain aspects regarding the book, so the video game did not arrive to be 100% faithful to the original.
Image of The Crime Abbey
Likewise, the deep narrative component of the graphic and conversational adventures facilitated the adaptation of more novels and successful stories. A significant example was the Mundodisco saga, by Terry Pratchett. The color of magic was translated with great fidelity to a textual adventure developed by Delta 4 and published by Piranha, although its bestseller disappointed the writer, as he commented in an interview for PC Gamer. Later, the artist would be personally involved in the adaptation of Mundodisco to his eponymous graphic adventure Discworld, along with Gregg Barnett, founder of Perfect 10 Productions. "I yell at them and threaten them a lot," Terry joked in the interview. “They teach me a lot of artwork and settings. They also pass drafts of the script and if there is something I don't like, I tell them that this does not work in Mundodisco, but I give them suggestions about other elements of the novels that can create the same effect. The result was a hilarious title with puzzles that followed the crazy logic of the Pratchett universe. For its part, AdventureSoft had released Simon The Sorcerer, deeply inspired by Discworld, but without the approval of Pratchett.
As for science fiction, we find the point & click horror I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison. The author collaborated closely with Cyberdreams for the adaptation of his famous story "I have no mouth and I must scream." David Sears, writer of the game, told Game Informer how the creative process of expanding the background of the tortured protagonists was at the mercy of AM, the cruel artificial intelligence that subjected them to an eternal nightmare. “The premise we worked on was the question I asked Ellison: Why has AM chosen these people and not others? At first, he was overwhelmed by a question that had never been asked, but then he set out to make a background for his characters on his typewriter. " Ellison, for his part, explained to Nightdive how he made each scenario as following a literary elaboration process. "If we were in a cave, (Sears) would ask me, 'What's going on here?' And I would answer him: 'What do you need at this point in the game? Action, adventure, revelation of a secret? How do I tangle and unravel the story? '” The result was a graphic adventure that delved into Ellison's work, with an atmosphere of surreal terror in which the misanthropic idea of the original story remained, with a few drops of hope in the face of human redemption.
Picture of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
Playing at being detectives
The graphic adventure is the perfect crop for creating a detective story, since the player's main skills are wit, visual acuity, and problem-solving ability. Thus, the Frogware studio created a video game saga for one of the genre's most beloved detectives: Sherlock Holmes. Inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, the developer crafted a series of games that addressed unprecedented mysteries for the researcher and his inseparable Watson. In them, the exploration of locations, compilation of clues and interrogation of suspects was mixed. During an interview for PSU, the studio itself delved into the latent pressure by Conan Doyle readers to create an adventure worthy of a myth that had already been beyond paper: “When you create a new episode for a character like Holmes, it's inevitable lose yourself in the stimuli around you. Your imagination is fueled by Sherlock movies, books, series and everything else. And it is normal, you long to be right with what people like about those characters. However, our inspiration not only comes from the Sherlock universe we consume. Music, cinema, ballet and other artistic expressions that feed our souls are also a source of inspiration for us. Even the words of one of our daughters can end up on Katelyn's lips. Our Sherlock is a mix of all those shared images, sounds, experiences, and desires. ”
And, if we talk about Arthur Conan Doyle, we cannot forget a great lady of the detective genre: Agatha Christie. The AWE Productions studio launched a series of graphic adventures based on the writer's best-known novels: And There Were None Left, Murder on the Orient Express and Evil Under the Sun. Scott Nixon, game director and heavy reader of Agatha Christie, received a proposal to adapt the novels to the graphic adventure. During an interview with Adventure Classic Gaming, the designer mentioned how the documentation when creating the adaptations could not only be based on Christie's books: “For And There Were None Left, we used architecture books as a reference. Lots of Frank Lloyd Wright and 1930s art deco stuff. We have a bookshelf full of books that we bought for that purpose. For Murder on the Orient Express, we were lucky to have a railway museum just outside Miamo that, among other things, has an original Pullman, the same car time that it appears in the Orient Express novel. ”
Image of And There Were None.
From the best seller to the toy library
When a novel becomes a mass phenomenon, it becomes the ideal candidate to make the leap to the big screen and, in turn, to receive its corresponding adaptation to the video game. This is the case of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, milestones of fantastic literature that have inspired two video game sagas, with their corresponding Lego universe that, with a more comical twist, is aimed at the family audience. In a more crude tone, we observe new literary phenomena that bet on a dark fantasy, far from the fight of good against evil and starring gray moral characters who are guided by their situation and their circumstances, a genre known as grimdark. Thus, A Song of Ice and Fire has inspired video games including Reigns: Game of Thrones, a card game in which we must maintain the balance of the kingdom through binary decisions, while the death of our characters does not mark the end of the game, but the progress of it. And, on the other hand, we cannot forget the literary saga of Geralt de Rivia (Andrzej Sapkowski), whose ending found a point and followed thanks to CD Projekt Red, developers of the The Witcher saga, which revolutionized the role-playing genre thanks to a medium and long-term decision system far removed from Manichaeism, and a complex combat system that explored the warlock's abilities.
Ken Follet's The Pillars of Earth inspired studio Daedalic Entertainment to create a graphic adventure that emphasized narrative. Matthias Kempke, screenwriter of the adaptation, told Game Reactor how they convinced the writer to grant him his rights to create a video play version of his star work: “After reading the book I identified some key illustrations that we could present to him. So we created several artistic works about the characters, the good guys, the villains, some architecture. Or the scene when you ride a horse through the English countryside and approach Kingsbridge on a winter day. How could that be seen? In this way we made several posters and a short video with music. We showed him part of a game that didn't really exist yet. And it was very exciting to discover what he might think about that, because we are talking about his book, his world. I would be interested? Would you recognize what we had done? He liked it. And I was really interested in how we visually interpreted the set, and how we could get players to relive the story or introduce them to the world of Kingsbridge. ”
Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3
If we look at our shelves, we will see many authors who have become very captivating video game muses. The famous Halo saga was inspired by Larry Niven's Ring World; Metro 2033, by Dmitri Glujovski, who made his novel available to all readers after multiple editorial rejections, which got the attention of 4Games, with whom he collaborated closely. And of course, we can't forget Lovecraft, a horror literature legend who has inspired multiple video games that reflect her exploration of dementia, such as Eternal Darkness; or his own stories, such as A Place For The Unwilling, Lovecraft Untold Stories or Call of Cthulhu. In the present report, as it is inevitable, there are not all who are, but they are all who are. Perhaps, for another chapter, we can explore more video games that were born from the pages that conquered the reading heart of a designer. Meanwhile, our shelves invite us on this Book Day to explore endless stories that were born on a blank sheet of paper and woke up on our console and / or computer.
