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Halycon planning Philp K. Dick games
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 27th May 2008
Halycon Company is now planning future game adaptations of the stories of Philip K. Dick.
According to a report in the The Guardian, Halycon Company is eager to make game adaptations of two of Dick's stories that will run alongside a major animation and two movie adaptations.
"Philip's daughters have never allowed anyone this kind of access before," commented Victor Kubicek, joint CEO of Halcyon. "Until we closed the deal we didn't realise how coveted the library was in Hollywood."
Dick wrote over 44 novels and 120 short stories in total, including many undisputed classics of the sci-fi genre. His writing style was often bizarre but strangely lucid and his stories often discussed the fragile nature of reality - something Dick himself was all too familiar with.
Dick's stories have been adapted for the big screen many times and films based on his books include Minority Report, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and Total Recall. Games meanwhile have been less represented, with only a handful of published titles, most notably the EA published Blade Runner in 1999 which had massive success.
Can another game adaptation of Philip K. Dick's possibly work? Could Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said be a decent third-person shooter, or would it be trumped by an RTS spin on Now Wait For Last Year? Let us know what you think in the forums.
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A Scanner Darkly would be very difficult to turn into a game without adding lots of hallucinations and stuff, as well as long stretches of not really doing anything.
Blade runner would be very cool, although they'd have to get the kibble just right for it to really work, and really concentrate on the original text, rather than the (admittedly excellent) film adaptation.
I think The Penultimate Truth could make a fantastic RPG adaptation, but again, the developer would have to be very careful not to stray too far from the book's core, and lose the feeling of the novel.
I quite enjoyed minority report on the gamecube, well enough to complete it anyways. Arcadey goodness.
Damn author never finished most of his stories!
http://64digits.com/users/cactus/MondoAgencyFixed.zip
The best PKD film conversions are the ones that have strayed quite away from the original material, i.e. turned them into action films with the background loosely based on the novels (something I don't mind as Dick was not exactly Wodehouse linguistically, nor a creator of Dickensian characters).
Any game that takes on themes of ethics, nature of reality, drug abuse and God (god?) is monumentally ambitious and, I daresay, doomed to failure. I wish the developers all the best (they'll need it) but I'm just not sure games as a medium is capable of doing his work justice yet.
Ack! That's screwed up my sound card drivers
:(
As for the rest of PKD's inventory, sheesh unless they make some drastic changes, they might have a problem or two on their hands.
Didn't they make a game of Total Recall? I have a vague memory of this but considering how long ago they made the film then its likely to have been some dodgy sideways scrolling platform/shooter combo.
After all, most PKD stories that have been made into films have been drastically altered before they reached the silver screen. Probably the closest to the original book was "A Scanner Darkly", but even that had vast tracts removed (particularly the bit where Substance D causes Fred to spy on Arctor, even though they're the same person - you just can't do that in film and keep a coherent story flowing).
Now games do allow for more immersion that films simply because they're interactive, but I still don't see how you can portray the psychology of the story while keeping the game interesting.