Movie scripts that is...
Eurogamer: Talking of Hollywood, has anyone from the movie world come up with a decent Half-Life movie script yet?
Gabe Newell: They all sucked!
Eurogamer: In what way did they suck?
Gabe Newell: They're just bad movies - movies that shouldn't get made. I'm a huge fan of movies, I love going to movies and we have absolutely no reason to do it. It's not like they've offered us these giant buckets of cash and said "let us go and ruin your game" [laughs]. They offer you little tiny amounts of cash, so it's like they've not even tried to bribe us to go and make a bad movie. So it's the one thing we're going to hold on to. Unless it's a great movie, unless it's as exciting a movie as the game was a game then it will never get made.
Eurogamer: Could you not just go and handpick a script writer and director and approach it that way?
Gabe Newell: We've tried that, but we've ended up with really uninspired scripts. It's just not going to happen until we think that there's a director and a cast and a script and can say this is a movie we'd like to go and see, and not just some vanity piece. We've seen what happens to those sorts of movies and the world would be a better place if nine tenths of those projects had never happened.
-- Interview - Opening the ValveGabe Newell: They all sucked!
Eurogamer: In what way did they suck?
Gabe Newell: They're just bad movies - movies that shouldn't get made. I'm a huge fan of movies, I love going to movies and we have absolutely no reason to do it. It's not like they've offered us these giant buckets of cash and said "let us go and ruin your game" [laughs]. They offer you little tiny amounts of cash, so it's like they've not even tried to bribe us to go and make a bad movie. So it's the one thing we're going to hold on to. Unless it's a great movie, unless it's as exciting a movie as the game was a game then it will never get made.
Eurogamer: Could you not just go and handpick a script writer and director and approach it that way?
Gabe Newell: We've tried that, but we've ended up with really uninspired scripts. It's just not going to happen until we think that there's a director and a cast and a script and can say this is a movie we'd like to go and see, and not just some vanity piece. We've seen what happens to those sorts of movies and the world would be a better place if nine tenths of those projects had never happened.
I could be really snarky here and say that it's evidence that Half-Life's story isn't really good enough to support a great movie script ... but instead I'll take the high road and appreciate that Valve is taking the concept seriously and not just tossing it out to the Hollywood fodder mill or hiring talentless directors.
What would be the foundation of a good Half-Life script though? Going back to the snarky ... how do you define a protaganist which was created to be undefined?
tagged: movies, gaming
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