Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 138)

Trigger Happy
140
For me, driving a touring car in a race game, I don’t want a
photo-realistic car in there, I want a computergenerated car. I
think it would spoil it as soon as you put a proper car in there.
I think in that, the interaction between the movie and the
videogame is a step in the wrong direction. These things need
to be generated by a computer. Okay, you can get them
looking absolutely gorgeous, with fantastic shading and all
these beautiful effects, but fundamentally I’m still looking at
an arcade game.
And the difference works the other way: even Bob
Hoskins in a padded suit is not as lovably squat as the
real Mario.
Yet even if you make your film entirely digitally,
along the lines of Toy Story or A Bug’s Life, a second,
major problem remains. In Star Wars, Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace, the plot stops for ten minutes for the
technically remarkable “pod-racing” scene, in which
the young Anakin Skywalker races a turbo-charged
hovercraft around the rocky Tattooine desert. Critics of
the film complained that this was just like a videogame,
but the point is precisely that it wasn’t anything like a
videogame. Because the viewer is not in control. The
pod-racing sequence was nothing more than an
extended advert for the actual videogame that