Gaming and film have long had a lot of crossover between them. Before we finally broke the video game curse with [insert whichever adaptation you like here], before triple-A games saw being compared to movies as the ultimate prestige and starting following manipulative emotional beats, and even before Kojima’s works were so obviously and shamelessly shaped by film, at a base level, they have always shared some DNA. So why aren’t we getting gaming biopics?

When I say gaming biopics, I don’t mean movies about Shigeru Miyamoto or Phil Spencer. I don’t mean something like Tetris, the recently released flick starring Taron Edgerton all about how the game Tetris was built. These are all movies about games. What I’m asking for is games about people.

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Gaming and movies have a lot of crossover when it comes to genre. If you like adventure movies like Indiana Jones, you’ll probably like adventure games like Uncharted. Like Star Wars? Play Mass Effect. Like The Evil Dead? Play Resident Evil. Lady Bird? Life is Strange. Event Horizon? Dead Space. Fast and Furious? Need for Speed. Tombstone? Red Dead Redemption 2. The Matrix? Deus Ex. I could do this all day, but I won’t.

Life Is Strange True Colors Screenshot Of Alex In Record Store

This isn’t a perfect likeness - you can’t really have a puzzle movie without interactivity, while most sports games are arcade sims rather than movies about specific sporting events or representations of what the sport means in the way Fighting With My Family, Remember The Titans, or Escape to Victory are. But there does seem like a way forward for a gaming biopic, which I suppose would be called a biogame but that sounds like something grown in a lab to reduce the impact on game dev farming.

This is in my head because I recently saw Air, the movie all about Michael Jordan signing with Nike and launching the Air Jordan. It’s definitely in the biopic category, but I’m not sure what for. Jordan himself obviously did far greater things than signing a shoe deal as a rookie, while Sonny Vaccaro, whom the movie follows, is best known for his work get college athletes compensated for their likeness - a fact only revealed to us in American Graffiti-style text on the screen before the credits roll. It feels mostly like it’s a biopic for the shoe itself. How the iconic footwear came to exist, and how it came to mean something more when Michael Jordan stepped into it.

joel hugging ellie in the last of us
via Naughty Dog

I’m not suggesting Naughty Dog’s next game be Ugg: The Story Of The World’s Most Expensive Slippers, but I do think if games are embracing storytelling, we should see someone try to take us on this sort of journey. I wrote last year, when Scream (2022) and The Matrix Resurrections were in cinemas, that movies were overtaking gaming’s innate ability to be meta because they were experimenting with the form more. In our quest for prestige experience, cutting edge graphics, and a loyalty to photorealistic immersion, few games are taking risks on experiments.

The best example of a game taking a huge swing would be Immortality, which is basically a biopic game already. Told through three different movies and various miscellaneous promotional and rehearsal footage, players are asked to piece together the life of Marissa Marcel, uncovering a dark conspiracy at the heart of her tale. This is exactly the sort of boundary pushing game I want to see, but at the same time, it’s both heavily reliant on film as an art form and entirely fictional. Though it takes cues from Marilyn Monroe, it’s not an attempt to tell her story.

Immortal figure taking on the form of Marilyn singing happy birthday in immortality.

The indie scene has been exploring a version of this for years. Indie games tend to be more personal, and so they reflect autobiographical experiences. It feels like every time I think ‘hey games should do this cool thing’, indie games have already done it. However, I still think a major biopic game with large studio backing, a sizeable budget, and the ability to tell not just a personal story, but the mythology of a real figure in the way Malcolm X, Raging Bull, Walk the Line, or La Vie En Rose do would be a fantastic experience for gaming.

Gaming and movies share a lot of genres, but biopics have been a constant staple of cinema, only occasionally appearing in gaming as stories from the developers’ own lives or telling the tale of a fictional character over the ages. As gaming grows its audience and the line between gamer and cinemagoer blurs, gaming might need to shift out of its comfort zone to create something fresh.

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