The Fallout of a Bad Adaptation and How to Avoid It

If history has taught us anything, it’s that video game movie adaptations have not been well received by critics and fans alike. The steady stream of disappointing releases caused a loss of trust in the general audience and an overall skepticism every time a new project was announced.?

In recent years, however, we’ve seen that trend start to change. Video game adaptations have been both critically and commercially successful. Movies like The Super Mario Bros Movie grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. HBO’s The Last of Us series received 131 award nominations?this past awards season. The latest release, Fallout, a TV series based on the popular action role-playing game, has already seen success for Amazon.?

So what changed in the last few years? One possible reason for the success is the involvement of key stakeholders. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, joined the project and even revealed the voice cast during a Nintendo presentation. Neil Druckmann, the creator of The Last of Us, contributed to the series' creation and implemented key changes that connected with audiences and fellow Clique employees. Todd Howard, creator of Fallout, challenged the creative team to tell a new story within the vast wasteland, expressing no interest in simply adapting a story already told in a previous game.?

Bringing in these key stakeholders ensured that the creators, who were closest to the material, could provide input. This helped keep the heart and soul of the project while adapting it to a different medium.?

I’ve applied similar lessons when trying to adapt what we know about our clients into new designs and, eventually, their new websites. We do extensive discovery with key stakeholders to know our clients better. We learn what makes them unique, who their audience is, and what their goals are. This results in a creative brief that we use as an anchor when working on designs. We go from a concept to a visual representation and, if we miss the mark, it could result in a loss of trust and the feeling that we don’t know our client.

When making the jump from a creative brief to a design and finally to a website, we apply best practices to adapt each phase. Our team's subject matter experts collaborate to ensure that an idea can be well executed and translated.

How do you adapt a 22- to 114-hour video game into eight compelling and cohesive episodes? You can't carry everything over one-to-one. So, you collaborate with stakeholders and experts to keep what makes it unique. This can create something both fresh and familiar, while keeping the spirit of the original and bringing it to a new audience.

Written by Jorge Velez, Fun Shirt Enthusiast and Project Manager at Clique Studios