Despite the fact that in the recent special that I dedicated to video games and anime it was once again clear that cinema is not the only source that developers draw from when creating games based on other works, it is true that it is the best known, probably due to the greater noise that titles based on films are capable of generating as part of their promotional campaign.
We have more or less clear, then, the relationship between video games and cinema, as well as that between video games and anime, but what about books? There are many video games that emerged from novels, but we can also find books based on video games on the market.
To begin with, we are going to briefly review a series of video games based directly on books. I will try to leave out those titles that are based on derivative works of the novels, such as those games based on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ films that Peter Jackson was commissioned to bring to the cinema and not directly on the work of JRR Tolkien .
The Abbey of Crime
‘La Abadía del Crimen’ is a Spanish game based on Umberto Eco’s novel ‘El Nombre de la Rosa’ (of which a movie was also made). It was launched by Opera Soft in 1987, when the video game development industry in our country was in very good health, and it was released for MSX , Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and PC.
‘The Abbey of Crime’ is an adventure starring the Franciscan Guillermo de Occam (in the novel he was called Guillermo de Baskerville) in which, over seven days, we must discover the author of a series of murders that take place in an Italian Benedictine abbey.
The Da Vinci Code
‘The Da Vinci Code’, the popular Dan Brown novel whose plot revolves around a mysterious murder that occurred at the Louvre Museum (Paris) and which has large doses of suspense, conspiracies and more, had its own video game adaptation in 2006 (PC, PS2, XBox).
The game, released by 2K Games, belongs to the third-person action-adventure genre and has nothing to do with the movie starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou. Unlike the novel, it was not well received. Normal, it is a title of the heap.
The Hobbit
After the great work of Peter Jackson in bringing ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to the big screen, we are still waiting for a decent movie based on ‘The Hobbit’ , the highly entertaining novel in which Tolkien began to outline this entire mythological universe that we know today.
In 1982, however, the Melbourne House company was in charge of launching the first video game based on ‘The Hobbit’ for platforms such as the MSX , the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64, to name a few. It was a conversational adventure that achieved more than remarkable success, reaching more than a million copies sold at the end of the 1980s.
Parasite Eve
‘Parasite Eve’, despite not having been officially released in Europe, is a well-known title in our country whose plot is based on the novel of the same name written by Hideaki Sena and initially published in 1995.
The game, a survival horror with some RPG touches starring a rookie cop named Aya Brea, was developed and distributed by Square and released on the Japanese market in March 1998 for the Playstation.
Many titles are left out of this small list. Games based on works by Agatha Christie (‘Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None’ or ‘Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun’) and HP Lovecraft (‘Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth’, ‘Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder ‘), for example, or titles like’ American McGee’s Alice ‘(based on Lewis Carroll’s novel’ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ‘),’ Discworld ‘(based on the series’ Discworld ‘by Terry Pratchett), etc., etc., etc.
In the next post we will go to the opposite side and we will take a look at a few books that emerged as a result of some video games.
Image | stephmcg
