When Hollywood studios set their sights on adapting a video game into a film, you sadly have to worry about how badly the game will be butchered on screen. Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to these projects, although adapting films into games doesn’t fare any better. On occasion when they do want to adapt a game into a film, you really have to question what it is they are smoking there at the game studios because it makes little sense as to why they want to take the project on. First was Joust, which was announced ages ago but I haven’t heard anything on that project since and now, they want to make the classic Atari arcade game Asteroids into a movie.
(take a moment to scratch your head in confusion)
I don’t get it either – I love Asteroids as much as the next guy and I even have the game sitting at my arcade but I still don’t understand where this movie idea came from. They must be looking at what made truck-loads of money back in the day and tying it to the nostalgia that people still have for classic arcade games to come up with this idea. It’s no secret that Asteroids has made tons and tons of money over the years for Atari and it is certainly one of their best recognized and best selling games they have had in their arsenal but to have expected to see a movie come out of it was not expected. Strangely enough, it appears that four movie studios were bidding on this, with Universal Studios coming out on top. I do wonder if they will hearken back to the Atari 2600 Asteroids manual for an idea on the storyline, not that there is much there to work with.
