Trigger Happy
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a hybrid future of “interactive movies,” it would be as
well to take a cold mental shower by looking at what
actually exists in film videogame crossover form.
Disney’s
Tron
(1982) was the first film actively to
engage in an aesthetic dialogue with videogames,
arguably as a symptom of Tinseltown’s increasing
insecurity about its silicon rival—for at the time, just
before their first market crash, videogames were
grossing more in America than the Hollywood cinema
and gambling put together.
Tron
is still probably the
best film of its kind. The shallow, primary-color fable
about a gameplaying wunderkind beamed into
cyberspace to do battle with an evil programmer was
based around live-action interpretations of existing
videogame formats (most notably the “light cycle”
race), and then soon became a licensed arcade
videogame in its own right.
For videogame companies, film licenses are often a
sure winner. Studios generally acquire the videogame
rights to a film, such as
Batman, Rambo, Aliens,
or
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and then produce a painfully
substandard platform game or shoot-’em-up that might
borrow a certain visual style from one or two of the
film’s scenes but has nothing to do with the story line.
In 1983, famously, Atari, having acquired the rights to
