Jun 3, 2015 Novelizations of games are common, but how often does it work the other way around? It turns out more often than you might think. The increasingly popular Witcher game franchise is widely known as a book adaptation, but it's far from the only example. Below are video games based on (or heavily influenced by) works of literature: The Witcher The Witcher is based on The Witcher book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, which started out first as a collection of short stories. The success of The Saga, the full-length novels following the short stories, landed Sapkowski and his series cult classic status mainly in Poland. It wasn’t until The Witcher’s video game adaptation in 2007 that other readers around the world began to take notice. Both The Witcher stories and games feature the same cast of characters, but take place years after the events of The Saga. There are five total books in the original saga written between 1994 and 1999, two of which are still being translated into English, and a sixth written in 2013 that serves as a prequel to the first book. Stalker STALKER (or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. if you insist) is a series of first-person shooters by GSC Game World, based loosely on the world created by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. The novel follows the story of Redrick "Red" Schuhart, an experienced stalker who ventures into the Zone to find valuable artifacts he can sell. In the novel Roadside Picnic, the Zones are restricted areas visited and then abandoned by aliens years prior. The nature of the extraterrestrial visits left the Zones riddled with mysterious, supernatural properties that make them very dangerous to enter. The STALKER games are also influenced by the film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and itself loosely based on Roadside Picnic. If you want to overcomplicate things, the Strugatskys also wrote a book called Stalker based on a screenplay of the film Stalker that was based on their first book. (There was even a play and a tabletop RPG!) All this to say, the world of STALKER has some rich media to pull from and we should totally get a new STALKER game please. PLEASE. Assassin’s Creed A lot of the games we’ve looked at so far are more or less direct adaptations of a book, but there are plenty of original games that still owe several of their ideas to works of literature. a.ssassin’s Creed is one of them. According to producer Jade Raymond, the first Assassin’s Creed was inspired by the 1938 novel Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. The novel is set in Alamut, which was a real Persian fortress located about 60 miles from what is now present-day Tehran. In the early 11th century, the Alamut fortress was controlled by a missionary named Hassan-i Sabbah and his a.ssassins, all historical facts used in the novel Alamut and then adapted into the a.ssassin’s Creed universe. A line in the novel Alamut, “Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted,” is used nearly word for word in the game: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Minus the sci-fi elements, Assassin’s Creed is historical fiction, so it makes sense that the book it’s based on is also rooted in history. BioShock I’m willing to bet most of you already knew this, but in case you didn’t… Ayn Rand is all over BioShock. The city of Rapture was founded on the principle of pure self-interest, the same idea that fuels Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Andrew Ryan himself is basically named after Ayn Rand. Similarly, you have Frank Fontaine, named after Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, and Atlas, named for Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Posters found around the game ask “Who is Atlas?” just like the repeated “Who is John Galt?” line from Atlas Shrugged. We can go on and on with the details, but more broadly, BioShock is an exploration of Ayn Rand’s philosophies and a critical critique of how absurdly bad things can get if objectivism is applied on a grand (albeit fantastical) scale. Metro 2033 Survival horror shooter Metro 2033 has its roots in a 2005 novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Like the game, the novel takes place in the subway system of a post-apocalyptic Moscow, devastated by nuclear holocaust. The player-character Artyom is the same as the protagonist in the novel, one of several characters who appears in both the game and the book. The book Metro 2033 was published in the United States in 2010, the same year the game launched. Unlike most of the games on this list, Glukhovsky himself has a writing credit for both his book and the video game adaptation. Bloodborne Bloodborne is like BioShock in the way it borrows elements from an author’s body of work rather than directly adapting a single story. While it was Ayn Rand for BioShock, it’s H.P. Lovecraft for Bloodborne. It’s easy to go blindly into the cold and ghastly streets of Yharnam thinking you’re just going to get another standard Gothic horror with witches and werewolves, but Bloodborne takes you by surprise by throwing in some interdimensional cosmic beings, eldritch gods, and other manners of unearthly, Lovecraftian horrors. I picked Bloodborne for this list because it’s the most current example of a video game adapting elements of Lovecraft’s famous brand of horror, but I’m going to dedicate this entry to the trove of games inspired by Lovecraft’s work. There’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Frictional’s earlier Penumbra series, Eternal Darkness, Alone in the Dark, Scratches, Prisoner of Ice, The Last Door, Eldritch, and obviously the Call of Cthulhu series. The list goes on. Spec Ops: The Line Spec Ops: The Line takes the premise of the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and applies it to a completely different era and setting, much like what the 1979 film adaptation Apocalypse Now did with the same book. While Heart of Darkness was set in the Congo in the late 19th century and Apocalypse Now was set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War in 1969, Spec Ops: The Line takes things into the near future in a sandstorm-wrecked Dubai. The game follows a group of soldiers trying to track down survivors in the aftermath of the disaster, including Colonel John Konrad, based on the infamous Kurtz from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now… things take off from there. http://n4g.com/news/1735371/11-games-you-didnt-know-were-based-on-books
Jun 3, 2015 Good read, I've known about the witcher, stalker, bioshock ofc, and metro; I have the Metro 2033 book, but I haven't read it yet.
