Are We in a Video-Game Adaptation Renaissance?

By Sydney Little

The Last of Us, I’ll admit, despite its popularity and critical acclaim, was a game I never cared for. The disconnect for me primarily arises from the game’s ending; the player has no choice but to kill the last of the Fireflies and escape with Ellie, regardless of whether or not that player might have made a different decision. That being said, the solution for this disconnect wouldn’t be, for instance, to give the player a choice; unlike in video games like Mass Effect or the Elder Scrolls series, the player is not the protagonist of The Last of Us: Joel is. And, given a hundred opportunities, Joel would always kill the Fireflies and potentially doom humanity to save Ellie. Interestingly, in Alex Barasch’s article for The New Yorker, “Can Video Games be Prestige Television?” Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us creator, says that Naughty Dog, the game’s developer, encouraged him to include a player choice at the end, presumably where Joel could surrender Ellie to the Fireflies, but Druckmann refused: “If the player can jump in and be, like ‘no, you’re gonna make this choice,’ I’m, like, ‘Now we kind of broke that character.’”

I admire that Druckmann protected the integrity of Joel’s character and the decision that he makes from Naughty Dog executives; that being said, I cannot help but feel the disconnect between the actions that Joel takes at the end of the game versus what I might have done. In the game, the player as Joel must choose either to kill the horde of Fireflies trying to kill Ellie for the cure, or simply not finish the game. So, the game forces the player to take an active role in a choice they might not have made given their own choice. That, for me, has always nerfed the impact of the game’s ending.

However, in the translation of the game from video game to television, the viewer does not have to wrestle with this disconnect. One could argue that The Last of Us, with its lack of meaningful player input — or, rather, its desire to tell a story that doesn’t involve player input — was always better suited to a passive medium like film or television. This is one of myriad reasons that made The Last of Us an exceptional candidate for adaptation where others are not. 

For instance, there has long been talk of adapting the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series into film; for their part, those games do follow a central narrative that would certainly translate easier into television or film than the open-ended, player-driven narratives of the aforementioned Elder Scrolls series. That being said, there is a certain extent to which an adaptation of Grand Theft Auto would be entirely redundant, given how heavily the series takes its cues from Martin Scorseses’ catalog of films, or Quintin Tarantino’s. The joy of the Grand Theft Auto series has always been the opportunity to insert oneself into a Reservoir Dogs-esque experience; what, then, would be the point in translating that experience back to film? The Last of Us also makes for excellent television because its adaptation isn’t superfluous; this kind of surrogate father-daughter relationship it centers is one we rarely see explored on film, let alone set against an America ravaged by a zombie-apocalypse.

Finally, it is worth noting that The Last of Us was never particularly beloved for its combat system; it is a third-person shooter, the likes of which the industry has seen many times. The Last of Us even has a particular paradigm of the genre. Certainly, the combat is serviceable; resources like health items and bullets are limited so that the player feels like a wanderer in the zombie apocalypse, vulnerable to any threat, human or otherwise. Furthermore, the game toggles between Joel and Ellie’s POV, allowing the player to inhabit both characters; Joel is bigger and stronger and thus can take more bullets, but Ellie is smaller, quieter, and less likely to be noticed when sneaking around. Thus, the player has to adjust their approach to enemy encounters depending on which character they are playing. All that being said, the beating heart of The Last of Us was always its narrative as opposed to its actual gameplay; it is certainly off the strength of its story, rather than its combat system, that the game remains in the cultural zeitgeist even to this day. This is in strict opposition to past failed video game adaptations such as Doom, Hitman, or Assassin’s Creed — all games renowned for their mechanics, rather than for their narratives, that lost something essential when translated to film.

Now that we have determined some of the elements that might have made The Last of Us’ smooth transition to television, it is worth now turning to what is perhaps the only other critically acclaimed video game adaptation: Arcane, which was adapted by Netflix from the popular MMO, League of Legends, and released last year. League of Legends, for the uninitiated (among which I, admittedly, number, as someone who’s never played the game), is a game in which two teams of five players fight each other in arena-style combat until a victor is declared, then rinse and repeat. Unlike The Last of Us, there is no environmental storytelling, no quests to complete, and no overarching narrative for the player to follow; League of Legends doesn’t even have a central protagonist, as the player can choose to battle as a different character or “champion” every time they log in. The story of League of Legends, in the form that it exists, is instead contained within character descriptions and flavor text. In fact, from the time that the game launched in 2010 to 2014, Riot, League’s developer, didn’t even have actual writers penning this flavor text, instead opting to have the game’s designers come up with descriptions for each of the playable characters, all of which, at the time, were a mere paragraph long.

This provides us with an interesting juxtaposition to The Last of Us, which was practically already formatted like a television show and only needed to be refilmed with live actors. What, then, are we to make of the success of Arcane, which, unlike The Last of Us, bears so little resemblance to its source material? How was Arcane able to appease not only those with no familiarity with League, but also those who have been playing the game since its launch? The answer, at its core, is quite simple. League of Legends’ story was always intended to be supplemental to its gameplay. Learning the backstory of your favorite champion might enhance your experience of the game, but your enjoyment isn’t dependent on it. League the Game, and League the Story, were always meant to be their own separate entities; Riot, in fact, started putting more of an emphasis on the game’s story in 2014 precisely with the aim of producing comics and other media based around the characters, rather than integrating it into gameplay. The series, then, functions in much the same way that those old, single paragraphs bios did in 2010: they’re there to provide context should you choose to seek it out. 

There is, however, one principle regard in which The Last of Us and Arcane are alike; namely, that people who were instrumental in the games’ development were likewise instrumental in the creation of the television series. The aforementioned Neil Druckmann, the creator of The Last of Us — and a man for whom the game’s story was deeply, deeply, personal — also served as co-runner, along with Chernobyl’s Craig Maizin, for the adaptation. Arcane’s two showrunners, Christian Linke and Alex Yee, are veterans of League’s design team. Often, the failure of video game adaptations can be attributed to a lack of understanding as to what made the game special or beloved in the first place. This wouldn’t be an essay about video game adaptations if there wasn’t at least some mention of Uwe Boll — whose the early 2000s takes of beloved video game franchises like Far Cry, House of the Dead, and Postal — were collectively so bad, conjecture arose that the movies were Boll’s way of smearing video games as an art form, cheapening them in the zeitgeist. Whether or not these accusations bear any merit, it is safe to say that Boll did not possess nearly the knowledge or affinity for his source material that people like Druckmann, Linke, or Yee did when adapting The Last of Us and League, respectively. Who better to guide these narratives and characters into a new form than the people who have already dedicated their lives to them?

Arcane and The Last of Us have proved that it is possible to make a video game adaptation that is both popular and critically acclaimed. The Last of Us, for its part, is being dubbed prestige television, likely due to the reputation of its network, HBO. This will inevitably lead to more talent taking video games as an art form more seriously. Who’s to say, for instance, that in the hands of a competent showrunner like Craig Maizin, an Assassin’s Creed television show couldn’t have succeeded? In that regard, the future for these kinds of adaptations is bright.