Gaming
Games
11 Games that could follow The Witcher into the episodic TV space
We started with a huge list, but got it down to 11 essentials, with a follow-up list of honourable mentions. But we stand behind these picks for games that could follow in the footsteps of The Witcher
With the success of Netflix’s The Witcher (off the back of the success and popularity of the game series, and books, of course), we’ve decided to look at what other gaming franchises could be episodically transformed for the binge-watching masses. Note: this is not a list of games that *could* be movies, we’re talking full-on TV series levels of investment and production. We had a lengthy list that we had to whittle down and we landed on these strong 11 where we not only suggest what style they could be produced as -- Live Action, Anime, Traditional Animation, CG Animation; Drama, Comedy, Family and Fantasy -- but also who could play the lead in them either in the form of acting or voice-acting. So, without further ado, here’s 11 videogames production houses should be looking at to turn into full-blown TV series.
Darksiders - CG Animation/Anime
This much-loved, yet much-troubled series has found its place among gamer hearts. Initially released in 2010 with the intention of spreading to five full releases given it involves the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the final entry ambitiously hoping to be a co-op romp), what’s *actually* been delivered is a Metroid and Zelda-styled action-adventure, a sandbox action-RPG, a straight-up Souls-lite action-platformer and most recently, a Diablo-looking isometric action-RPG. It’s a series that can’t seem to die, which is a kind of poetic irony, but one brimming with transmedia potential. Created by comic book royalty, Joe Madureira, and designed by a team who proactively share their influence hearts on their sleeves, Darksiders is ripe for series expansion in the TV space.
Cast: Everyone who has voiced each lead in all four games currently available.
God of War - Live Action, Big Budget
Mimir know the local lingo
© Sony
We introduced this feature with Netflix’s The Witcher series, which managed to fill a void many had at the end of Game of Thrones (and likely to wash the salty taste out of their mouths from *that* ending), but also grabbed said audience with its unique spin on fantasy.
Rumoured not so long ago, the most recent God of War’s director, Cory Barlog, allegedly suggested that a God of War TV series not unlike The Witcher *could* be a thing. Even more recently, there have been rumours of a movie -- but we’re having none of that. Rather, we see this in the vein of The Witcher, with Kratos and Atreyus going on godly Viking adventures throwing back to that amazing series from the 70s, “Lone Wolf and Cub”. One god out of place being the Ronin character, and Atreyus his motherless son, both adventuring, surviving and learning to understand each other through adversity and triumph.
Cast: Kratos - Gerard Butler (has already played a Spartan warrior in 300), Atreyus - Noah Schnapp (Stranger Things, Season 2).
Hellblade - Live Action, Big Budget
What Hellblade also has over the other shows mentioned above is a lean on mental health, with Senua dealing with psychosis and PTSD, which gives any such series an important societal position on how these things are both faced, and dealt with...
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice would be a perfect fit for episodic television with a decent budget. It already has elements of popular shows such as Vikings, The Witcher and Game of Thrones, however, what it also already has is an actor-in-waiting, Melina Juergens, who did facial and body motion-capture for the lead character, Senua, and also lent her voice and likeness. This also happened without her even realising she would wind up landing the full part (she was initially a test stand-in), and is fantastic in the role. What Hellblade also has over the other shows mentioned above is a lean on mental health, with Senua dealing with psychosis and PTSD, which gives any such series an important societal position on how these things are both faced, and dealt with. Add to all of that high-action, wickerpunk mythos and a celtic/viking/barbarian theme, all with a female lead in the mold of the true life Boudica, and you’ve got yourself a successful series stew.
Cast: Senua - Melina Juergens (been there, doing that), Druth - Nicholas Boulton (been there, presumably still doing that).
Brutal Legend - Traditional Animation
The legend of Eddie Riggs needs to live on!
© EA
Many reading this might not know of Brutal Legend -- an open-world action-adventure title from the fine folks at Double Fine Studios (now officially a Microsoft studio after acquisition), which starred one Jack Black as a roadie somehow cast into a Heavy Metal album cover universe. It featured an incredible soundtrack featuring the likes of Rotting Christ, Budgie, Mastadon, Cradle of Filth and even Ozzy Osbourne (who incidentally plays a character in the game as well), among many, many others.
While Jack Black is a huge star, he never shies from passion projects, nor anything to do with music -- specifically metal-related music. This universe Double Fine created is also fleshed out with plenty of lore that can be extrapolated to further storylines, and we’re sure even Ozzy would be keen to jump on board. This one is actually a no-brainer -- look at how popular Metalocalypse was.
Cast: Eddie Riggs - Jack Black, Ophelia - Jennifer Hale, The Guardian of Metal - Ozzy Osbourne.
Iron Harvest - Live Action, Big Budget
Can the mech on the far right please come in closer?
© Koch Media
Polish artist, Jakub Rozalski, created a series of artworks where he painted in giant steam and dieselpunk mechs, as background characters in traditional landscape paintings set in 1920s Europe. Since, his art has become known as 1920+ -- effectively an alternate universe to the one we know where giant machines, robots and more, exist alongside the farming plains of yesteryear post World War I. Iron Harvest is a game inspired by this 1920+ universe, and with shows like The Man in the High Castle and other alternate history media, such as the reimagined Wolfenstein series from MachineGames, it’s not difficult to see something like this become a reality.
What would hold it back would be budget, but people are putting robots and lightsabers into regular videos all the time, and with a decent studio in charge, we reckon it could work.
Cast: Anyone keen to wear ye olde threads and chew on a piece of wheat.
Max Payne - Live Action, Gritty Budget
Oh, wait... maybe Ben Affleck?
© Rockstar
And the studio who started it, Remedy, continues to make games in episodic nature in its wake. What we see here, however, is a series that can go full Punisher or, riskily, Bandersnatch...
Noire-styled content is a rare breed these days, unless it’s part of throwback media. But gritty comic-book-styled media is 10 cents a 12 (sorry, Aussie humour there). While Netflix shone with Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and The Punisher, only to lose them in the wake of the creation of Disney Plus, and Marvel becoming a wholly owned business from Disney, we’re still seeing the likes of The Boys and Watchmen taking up the slack.
Max Payne began its life as an homage to John Woo and The Matrix, while also doubling down as a comic-book-inspired noire ‘out on your luck’ detective piece. Nothing in any of what we just wrote isn’t already *ready* for TV. And the studio who started it, Remedy, continues to make games in episodic nature in its wake. What we see here, however, is a series that can go full Punisher or, riskily, Bandersnatch, where the audience ‘becomes’ the detective, to a degree. Of all of the options we’ve listed, this old hand looks ready to move from the black and whites into the Technicolor. And beyond the controller.
Cast: Max Payne - If he’s capable, Bruce Willis, otherwise this one is an open casting call but we see Timothy Olyphant killing it.
Just Cause - Live Action (and episodic with massive sprinkles of Spanish operatic cheese)
Even upside down, he manages to pull off 'cool'
© Square Enix
An open-world destruction simulator, Just Cause, is a series that knows what it wants to be: OTT to the Max Power. That is to say, it is a Bond-ish bend on freedom fighters fighting despots in made-up archipelago, with all the destruction options available to the player, and all the henchpeople you could want, to help make said destruction ‘creative’. In a way, this is a series Robert Rodriguez or Edgar Wright would only dream of writing and directing in a passive sense.
From a TV perspective we see this as an over the top comedy of errors. But, rather than the good guy “oh, oh spaghettio”-ing his way through events, it’s the despots that rise in the wake of his having crushed the last one. Imagine a series where the hero is just all Fabio and the baddies are all just Mr Beans waiting in line to be the next ruler of a country (or evil island). If any production houses are reading this… you’re welcome.
Cast: Rico Rodriguez - While we’d love to see the likes of AntonioBandares, Benecio Del Toro or even Jimmy Smits taking up the cultural flag, it’s hard to look past Skyfall’sJavier Bardem in the lead here. The despots and henchpeople should ALL be camoes from other well-known cinepeeps, just to keep the “operatic cheese” ever-melting.
Assassin’s Creed (series) - Anime
Introducing Bayek of Siwa
© Ubisoft
Oooooh, we went with anime here. How does that sit with everyone? With us, just fine. If you look at series like Berserk, Full Metal Alchemist, Trigun, Samurai Champloo or even Cowboy Bebop, it’s easy to see how episodic content would permeate the Assassin’s Creed world. Moreover, we’re sure we’re not alone in thinking the movie wasn’t ‘believable’ in the context shadow of the games, so being able to go way overboard with action from an animation perspective makes sense. We’ve also seen success here in the post-mentioned Batman Ninja, Dead Space and Mass Effect series where style, art and imagination aren’t limited.
How this works, equally, is that while we’ve had Altaïr, Ezio, Connor, Haythem, Aveline, Edward (father of Connor), Adéwalé, Shay Patrick Cormac, Arno Victor Dorian, Shao Jun, Arbaaz Mir, Nikolai, Jacob and Evie, Bayek of Siwa, Alexios and Kassandra, there’s room to introduce new Assassins from myriad cultures and timelines. Or, revisit all of the Assassins mentioned above in anthology form. Think The Matrix “Animatrix” anthology or the seminal Batman: Gotham Knight.
Cast: We literally don’t have time or space to cover every Assassin mentioned above, or their Animus controllers from the future so… casting call.
Mass Effect - Live Action, Big Budget
Funny how much time you had to just *do* side-missions while Earth was...
© EA
Andromeda didn’t even fix that itch, which still lingers. Mass Effect is a seminal masterwork of arcing a trilogy in games. While it shifted (rightly) from full-blown RPG to action-RPG (lite) in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, respectively, the series -- including the final entry -- maintained the same pacing and writing tone that bound all three games together. And a storyline for the ages. However you might feel about the overall ending of the three acts, everything that happened to get there is beyond memorable.
Mass Effect comics and animation exist, but we see a series here with actors and epic set-pieces. And with the success of the trailblazing Battlestar Galactica reboot alongside new stalwart, The Expanse, and a renewed focus on episodic big budget content, Mass Effect just makes so much sense. Myriad articles have explored the future of the IP, and it already has a heavily-invested audience-in-waiting alongside untold stories yet to be told, which is the beauty of spacefaring science fiction.
Cast: Casting call here as we see this as a next step rather than tackling either the original trilogy or Andromeda in live action form.
Ori - Traditional Animation
Just purely art that pops. You call almost call it 'pop' ar... oh, wait
© Microsoft
Lookit, Ori is already effectively an animation-turned-videogame. And the backgrounds and animations featured in the most recent Ori and the Will of the Wisps are just jaw dropping. So while it’s a visual no-brainer, what tickles us spirit white is the world-building around it -- there’s something whimsical and special around Moon Studio’s Ori game-world and in the most recent release, the lengths the studio went to, to tell stories with set piece design and a “lived-in” aesthetic gives strength to how this could be delivered.
The challenge we perceive is around the game-world’s language where conversation among characters is concerned, as Moon Studios uses a Banjo-Kazooie-style of made up gibberish with subtitles to relay narrative. It’s not a massive hurdle and, honestly, adds to the charm of the game anyway, so it’d be something hopefully fully embraced (on the assumption this would *ever* happen).
Cast: Anyone schooled in gibberish in a meaningful way.
Metro - Live Action, Big Budget
Even in a mutant storm, you gotta find time to enjoy simple things
© Koch Media
The most recent release in the Metro series, Metro: Exodus, could be seen as a problem for any series created around Dmitry Glukhovsky’s best selling Metro series of books, in that it takes our survivors out from the ‘safety’ of the Metro where the first batch of games took place, and where most stories in the books centre. But it also opens up the options for storytelling in episodic form by exposing the post-apocalyptic Russian landscape, and the pockets of society that have formed there.v
Opportunity for the fantastical, alongside real-life struggles; relatability stacked against awe and, in some form, terror...
Similarly to the earlier-mentioned Iron Harvest, this is ‘alternate history’ with an opportunity for the fantastical, alongside real-life struggles; relatability stacked against awe and, in some form, terror. Dark, gritty and character-driven, we left this last because of all opportunities mentioned before it, the Metro IP feels ready made for episodic television and streaming. The largest hurdle we see is whether you cast Russian actors and go with subtitles, or do you cast Russian actors who can speak English and run with accents? The last option would be Chernobyl-esque in that any such production runs with wholly English-speaking actors and just uses Russia as the background.
Cast: See above.
/End
And that’s it. We wanted five, then that bloomed to nine and we landed on 11 from a list of some 50. And yeah, we know there’s thousands more from videogame history that can be added here, but our fingers are tired. So this is our definitive list… for now. Below is a quick list of ‘honourable mentions’ that didn’t make the cut (rounding out to 22), unfortunately, but would serve a place in a production house of some form.
Honorable Mentions
- The Last of Us/Uncharted
- Control/Quantum Break/Alan Wake
- Cuphead
- Cyberpunk
- Doom (Eternal)
- Dishonored
- Titanfall/Apex Legends
- Fortnite
- Dying Light
- Gears of War
- We Happy Few
For more gaming and gaming culture coverage, follow @redbullgaming on Twitter and Instagram and like us on Facebook.
