Anyone who has ever had a phone knows the importance of games. Be it a simple Nokia with a snake-game on it or today’s high definition games that we find churning out the last juice of performance from our Quad-core phones.
They are one of the most engaging forms of entertainment and since their inception, movies (the biggest entertainment business) has been trying to use it as either a source of revenue or a source of publicity.
Sometimes, the crossover has been other way round as well with games like Max Payne and Tomb Raider finding themselves getting made into motion picture.
Tie-in games have been a part of Hollywood industry for some time now. Earlier these games were mostly launched on a PC, a Playstation or a similar console.
Now, with the mobile phones are taking the center stage, movie makers have also shifted to the platform. It is of note that some games related to movies have launched in Java format as well thereby able to run on Java enabled phones.
Most of these games however are poorly designed. Not much effort was put into them and many a times they were utter disappointment. I have played enough games to know that. The pressure of including the story line into game play was often too much to create a game that could be called a high end game. I am not counting games here that are based on comics. They are usually better made as the story line is unique.
There are numerous examples out there like Ra.1 game that was launched for PS2. I agree the movie was average as well but the game could have done better. Similarly, there are games like one based on Krissh if I recall.
Surprisingly, all this suddenly changed with the launch of Temple Run. Suddenly a wave of movie games were launched, some directly related like Temple Run: Brave and most independent but following exactly the same principle. Most of these games are not bad as well.
Recently, for Chennai Express, a game was launched that was also a runner game similar to Temple Run or Subway Surfer. Similarly a running game was launched for Despicable Me 2. A minion was running as the playable character.
It is very interesting to see that movie makers have found a simple canvas on which they can launch almost any game on any movie. The quality of game can obviously suffer in such games as well but generally as the format is tried and tested, it is easier to make the game and maintain a certain level of standard. In addition, these games see good number of downloads as well. For example, Chennai express game has been downloaded 2 million times!
Other template besides Temple Run is obviously the Angry Birds template that is currently being used for Star Wars and was previously used for the movie Rio. We might soon find Indian movies as well with the same gameplay style.
All in all, these games have given movie makers the opportunity to invest less and reap better benefits in publicity and sometimes profits as well.
What do you think?
