After Christopher Nolan appeared at the 2020 Game Awards to present its highest honor, the Game of the Year, the director has since sat down with the awards’ mastermind Geoff Keighly to answer a handful of fan-submitted questions. One of the topics that came up was the question of whether Nolan would ever consider adapting his blockbuster films into a video game.
His answer? “It’s definitely something I’m interested in,” Nolan said, though that answer came with certain caveats. He explained that the possibility had been raised previously with some of his works–he specifies that he had already gone “fairly far down the road with” Inception–though his biggest priority is making sure it’s done properly.
“You don’t want to just be doing a licensed game, you don’t want to just be tying in with something and using the brand established by the film,” he explained. He made the comparison to the flip side of the coin, film adaptations of video games, in that they have to be approached in the right way if they’re ever going to succeed.
While bad movie tie-in games are a dime a dozen, more recent titles have proved it’s possible to adapt a filmic property into a fantastic video game. Alien: Isolation is one game that’s done justice to its source material, along with another recent horror game, Blair Witch. Jurassic World Evolution succeeded by taking a unique approach to its source material, rather than trying to ape the story of the movie as an action game. Even going back decades, GoldenEye 007 on the N64 proved it was possible for a game based on a film to grow beyond the legacy of its source material.
Now the only question is: which one of Christopher Nolan’s film worlds would be the best setting for a video game spin-off?
