Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 137)

Trigger Happy
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visuals of the Blade Runner city yet, welcomed these
in-built visual limitations of the tech-noir genre
thankfully, since it had so much else on its silicon
mind.
As well as influencing hundreds of other
videogames, mostly futuristic shoot-’em-ups, Blade
Runner has also been made into a rather successful
adventure game in its own right. But we have seen
already that influential currents between the two media
do not run only one way. And this turns out to be true
even of Ridley Scott’s own remarkable film: one of the
production designers on Blade Runner has said that his
work was inspired by the cabinet art on—what else?—
an arcade videogame.
But while creative aesthetic interpollination
between films and videogames may have positive
results, the attempt at wholesale translation from one
medium to the other is usually doomed. If you make a
film based on a videogame world, you instantly lose
what is most essential to the videogame experience.
One problem is that pleasurably unreal visual qualities
will be lost. Good software simulation of grass, for
instance, can, in its necessary stylization, be more
aesthetically interesting than a field of real grass on
film. Jeremy Smith, managing director of Core Design,
is very decided on this point: