David Hayter on why movie-based games suck

While there are games like GoldenEye that stand out as classics despite being a tie-in for a movie, most other games under that category are pretty much in the realm of the damned. David Hayter, better known as the voice of Solid Snake, shares his take on how that happens.

While there are games like GoldenEye that stand out as classics despite being a tie-in for a movie, most other games under that category are pretty much in the realm of the damned. David Hayter, better known as the voice of Solid Snake, shares his take on how that happens.

“I work on very expensive movies, [so] I’m pretty intimately involved with the process,” he said. “What happens is, nobody wants to pull the trigger [on a big-budget movie] because once you do it becomes a freight train rolling, there is no way to stop it. Once you pull the trigger on $100+ million, that’s a train you don’t want leaving the station unless you’re absolutely sure.”

“So it takes a long time for people to agree that the movie is going forward and once it does, it just goes. And the filmmakers start spending money before the studio gets cold feet. So they drag their feet and drag their feet and drag their feet, and then they give the green light and suddenly you’re going, you have to be shooting this summer.”

The effect? Developers end up having to rush to meet the deadlines, leaving a very compromised game to hit the stores. There are, however, cases like Iron Man 2. “With something like ‘Iron Man 2,’ from the opening weekend of [the first] ‘Iron Man’ you know you’re making ‘Iron Man 2.’ So theoretically, the video game adaptation should be great. But that’s really the only situation where you’re going to get enough advance time and enough advance money to do a proper video game adaptation.”

Still, the Iron Man 2 game received poor reviews and became the season’s example of a flop movie-game.

[via MTV Movies Blog]