The recent and wildly successful “Hunger Games” movie has not been lost on the videogame industry. With every movie franchise these days, there is an inevitable release of an accompanying video game. However, with the fandom that surrounds the books and movie, would it be appropriate for “The Hunger Games” to be created into a videogame?
Lionsgate, the company which owns the rights to “The Hunger Games” film series is planning on turning the movie into a console videogame. The news article below debates the pros and cons of a videogame release. There is already a mild facebook version, but the potential of a full scale game has created much controversy.
In summary, “The Hunger Games” is about 24 kids sent to an arena that must fight to the death until there is one remaining victor. The storyline has great potential for a videogame, but the themes may be too much considering the primary fan following is middle-school aged kids. Modern videogames don’t exactly have a history of being mild, and kids killing kids is a very risky area for a game with such a young audience.
Many who were skeptical of the movie are even more uncertain about a videogame. “While parents might be able to talk themselves into letting their kids see the movie, because the violence is masked by various PG-13 filmic techniques, there isn’t much chance of that happening in video-game land,” writes Matthew DeBord on the Southern California Public Radio website.
However, a “Hunger Games” videogame could suffer the same fate as many other movie franchise related videogames such as Electronic Arts’ “Harry Potter.” Nonetheless, with the high publicity of the movie, this article predicts the game will be at least mildly successful. I guess we’ll have to wait until the game comes out to see its true effect.
“The Hunger Games: Great Book. Good Movie, Dangerous Videogame?” – http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2012/0404/The-Hunger-Games-Great-book.-Good-movie.-Dangerous-video-game