Complex Movies That Would Work Better As Video Games

When it comes to science fiction movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the very best. It brings up heady ideas about humanity, evolution, and artificial intelligence that we still debate to this day. At the same time, though, the movie has far-out visuals that put Doctor Strange to shame, and this is on top of a slow pace that's compounded by many of the scenes having little or no dialogue. In fact, this movie topped a prominent list of the most confusing movies of all time. However, there are seeds in this confusing movie that would make an absolutely awesome video game.

In spirit, a 2001: A Space Odyssey game would likely play out like a much more serious version of the hit game Portal. The malevolent robot HAL 9000 would play the role of a GLaDOS-like character who is simultaneously interested in humanity as well as protecting himself from humans at all cost. The events of the movie lend themselves pretty naturally to puzzles for a player to solve, and these may range from repairing equipment to rescuing fellow crewmen who have been targeted by HAL. Ultimately, such a game could still deliver poignant messages about the nature of humanity, but it would be done in a tight game driven by dialogue and several sets of urgent-but-innovative puzzles.

The Matrix has already had a game. In fact, it's had several: there was the awkward Max Payne rip-off Enter the Matrix, followed by the less awkward Max Payne rip-off The Path of Neo. In the middle was The Matrix Online, which mashed the gun-fu of the other games into the classes and hot keys of a standard MMORPG, leading to decidedly mixed results. But a better video game could provide us with a fresher glimpse of the world established by the first movie.

Ultimately, the Matrix series was a victim of its own success. The sequels suffered from a variety of problems. However, the Animatrix movie (really a collection of small animated films) let us see how fun this world could be by changing everything up. One tale in this collection showed how robots first rose up against humanity, while another shows how an old-school, noir-style detective gets caught up in a world of Agents and rebels. A video game could finally explore something other than just the gunplay and bullet time of these movies.

For instance, three-dimensional platforming (à la Mirror's Edge) would showcase the true fun of bending the rules of physics, while a survival horror–style game could explore what it's like in the early days of robots taking over the world. There's even room for an unconventional multiplayer online battle arena game with multiple roles for players. For instance, different players could handle roles fighting in the Matrix, hacking the Matrix, and defending the real-world ship from squid-bots, all while other players controlling agents and squid-bots try to eliminate humanity. In short, this would be the opportunity for the world of the Matrix to finally show us it knows more than kung-fu and guns.

Of all of the movies on this article that feature some element of time travel, The Butterfly Effect is one of the grimmest. Its plot revolved around a character realizing that his lifelong memory blackouts surrounding various traumas (including being forced into child pornography, seeing his dog burned to death, and accidentally killing a mom and her child with dynamite) are moments that he can travel back to as an adult. He attempts to improve the future, but manages to create progressively darker versions of the world for himself and his friends. It's an entertaining enough take on the concept of the butterfly effect itself, but the frequent time jumps, reality warps, and ambiguous ending all added up to audience confusion, and the performances led to some unintended audience laughter. However, its premise alone gives it the potential to be one of the greatest games ever made.

This should be an adventure game with an emphasis on finding and connecting clues. Ideally, the player would be given a simple-sounding goal (such as "don't kill that poor lady with dynamite") and then go back in time, but be forced into a series of interactions and actions before they can achieve it. Once they go back, though, the future should be dramatically changed (and potentially far worse) based on the conversations and actions that they took. At this point, the player should have a choice of whether to travel back to the same moment or to choose a different destination to fix their inevitable mistakes. Ultimately, this game would encourage casual replaying as players try to figure out what action or conversation selection led to a particular disastrous outcome. This game could have countless different endings, with none of them outwardly telegraphed as "good" or "bad"—they're simply the ultimate result of the choices players make, forcing players to confront the dangers of both playing god and tampering with time.

As a movie, Prometheus played out a lot like your high school crush: it was beautiful, bewildering, and perhaps more shallow than you initially thought. Audiences thought they were going to get a straightforward prequel to the first Alien movie from director Ridley Scott, but he delivered a head-scratching tale of space exploration, alien gods, and a mysterious black liquid that had a different effect on people every time we saw it. So, even as we cheer the escape of our two survivors from the hostile planet, we are left with questions about the role of the god-like aliens, what the ooze was, why it had such different effects, and so on. You can't help but feel that if you were let loose in that environment—an experience only video games really offer—you'd be able to uncover answers to all those questions.

A Prometheus video game would be best in the form of an open-world survival horror game. There would be an amazing planet for players to explore and discover (possibly with the option of randomly generating a new planet each time, like in Minecraft), but there's the constant overt threat of the alien Engineers (who will immediately try to kill you if you disturb their slumber) and the more covert threat of the black alien goo, which threatens to turn friends and allies into nightmare creatures. Throw in a literal AI partner in the form of android David, and you get one more layer of tension, as many parts of the game would be insanely difficult without his help, but he may choose to abandon or infect you in his quest to better understand the aliens on this hostile planet.

12 Monkeys follows a character who comes from a future where humanity has been almost entirely wiped out by a virus, and he is sent back in time to gather enough information about it to help the scientists of his present time develop a cure. While that may sound straightforward, the movie explores heady concepts such as predestination paradoxes, fate, and a kind of apocalyptic inevitability that hangs over the entire plot. All of these combine in a way that's likely to leave audiences arguing once the credits roll, but this movie's plot is very fertile ground for a new and dynamic type of game.

This game would be a detective story with a time-travel twist. You play a character who must chase down various clues to achieve your goals, but all of this is made more difficult by the sometimes-inaccurate information from your post-apocalyptic future as well as your own memories of the past, which are sometimes unreliable. Ultimately, this would be the real innovative twist of this game: your history and memory are unreliable, and the constant threat of causing the very things you are trying to avoid means each game has the potential to play out very different from your other sessions.