Blair Witch: Can Indies Break The Hollywood Game Curse?

We’ve gone from GoldenEye level movie tie-ins to novelty marketing tactics, but can indies break free of adaptation fatigue with Blair Witch?

I was around five when my Dad passed me the N64 controller to practice writing my name in bullets on the walls of GoldenEye 007. I didn’t know it was one of the world’s favourite shooter games at the time and I barely knew it was based on a movie, but as I approach my 24th year on planet Earth, I can appreciate just how successful that game was. GoldenEye 007 was an excellent game in its own right, with all the mechanical innovation and hypnotic game feel one would expect from a chart-topping experience. The reason it felt so good to play, even to a naive child with hands barely big enough to hold the controller, was because it didn’t need to be a James Bond game to make sense.

We’ve somewhat lost that movie magic in the video game industry. Skip forward from my early awkward interactions with an N64 controller and I can remember walking out of a cinema eagerly wondering when the video game version of whatever adventure I had just experienced would be out. While the ET debacle had scared developers from working within Hollywood’s timelines in the decades previous, the late ’90s and early 2000s saw a renewed interest in movie games, and I lapped them up. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was the first game I got for my Game Boy Advance, I snuck a DS running Pirates of the Caribbean into pretty much every boring adult event I attended, and hell, I still have a copy of Disney’s Tarzan Untamed on my shelf.

These games weren’t anything special, sure. But they took the universes of the movies they were essentially promoting and actually made a game about it. With dedicated mechanics and everything. Now look at the Lego games and tell me it’s not just the same game with a fresh lick of paint for each franchise that dumps an IP on their desk.

Now that both games and movies are on even tighter schedules, both eagerly sifting through each release for the next big hit, we’re resigned to those pesky digital blocks filling the video game tie-in void. That opinion might change soon, however. Blair Witch is releasing at the end of August, and so far it looks like it genuinely takes the atmosphere of the original Blair Witch movie and actually puts you in the middle of it.

The difference here is the actual desire to make this game. There’s no opening weekend deadline to meet – it was 20 years ago. There’s no obvious sell; those who remember the original film may pick up a copy because of it, but I’m willing to bet few of Blair Witch’s players will buy it because it’s got the Lionsgate stamp on it. Instead, Blair Witch is being made out of a genuine celebration for the film’s events and universe. And from what we’ve heard so far, that’s reflected in the final product.

Speaking with VentureBeat, Barbara Kcuik, the game’s writer, describes how the team wanted to translate the fear of the original film into gaming’s language, rather than replicating the experience with a controller:

“We believe that you can’t simply take the source material and adapt it to different media. It doesn’t work. They use different methods of expressing the story. For example, Blair Witch the movie uses found footage, and that’s done to shorten the distance between the viewer and the characters in the movie. But in a game that’s not necessary because that distance is already pretty short. You’re playing in first-person and you control the characters. In a sense you are the character. So why use the same method the second time? In a game, working in the camera that way would actually create more distance.”

It’s this attention to what makes a game a game, and crucially, what makes this game expand this universe in a way that feels faithful while also taking advantage of the new interactive medium that looks set to separate Blair Witch from the marketing fodder we’ve sadly come to accept. The developers are even including a system that measures and responds to your own demonstrations of fear as a player which, if pulled off well, will open up the lore of the Blair Witch universe itself to ludic translation perfectly suited to the video game medium.

In the original film, it almost feels like the Blair Witch herself has a habit of hiding, waiting, watching, and learning about the characters’ fear. It’s an overarching atmosphere of being totally isolated but never quite alone that, in the film, is achieved partly by the handheld camera through which we view the action. In the game, that same feeling looks set to be achieved through the knowledge that your reactions to stress are being measured by an omnipresent system with the sole purpose of scaring you more, very much like the witch herself. If it’s anything like I’m imagining from its early press announcements, such a translation of filmic processes to ludic ones will lead the way for future adaptations.

This all remains to be seen, however. If Blair Witch delivers on its promises to take its source material and truly translate it into a ludic system, we could see some major shakeups in the world of video game adaptations. It’s the indies and classic films leading this charge, however. Triple-A studios won’t touch an adaptation without a franchise draw of guaranteed sales or an Endgame-level opening weekend on the table, but these are the types of IP that will see success in adaptation purely because of this lack of monetary pressure.

Sure, there are still financial decisions to be made, but there’s far more flexibility for the indies who are going to be picking up these contracts to fully explore new ways to bring each cinematic universe to ludic life in its own right. Movie video games may make their comeback, but they won’t be films from this decade and we’re all the better for it.