I read this story on Gaming News site Gamasutra the other day and I'm still trying to figure out exactly how a
(Damn it, hoist by my own pedantic petard, thanks for the tip Shane)
According to a new report, Electronic Arts' best-selling franchise The Sims will be getting a live action film treatment from 20th Century Fox, with Eragon and Norbit producer John Davis at the helm.
Variety's website is reporting that the Fox has picked up the feature rights to Will Wright's massive hit franchise, and will be producing the live action film under producer Davis and screenwriter Brian Lynch.
Lynch has previously scripted his own feature length film, Big Helium Dog, which has yet to see release, and was the writer for the Spike:Asylum series of comic books based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff TV series Angel.
Electronic Arts' Sims studio head Rod Humble is said to be managing the conversion. He told Variety, "
The Sims has done an interactive version of an old story, which is what it's like to have infinite power and how do you deal with it. Given that that's an old story, you can imagine how easily that would translate to traditional story telling."
Nothing further of the film has yet been announced, including plot details or any proposed cast.
Given that there is no story to The Sims - beyond that of living, consuming, breeding and dying - how exactly is this going to work. It doesn't worry me that the scriptwriter has worked on comic books primarily, they offer some of the most sophisticated forms of story telling around at the moment although these at least had some kind of character history and language to go on. The writer also wrote Scary Movie 3 (I'm not sure what that means but at least they are taking the project seriously)
I have thought that it might make an interesting story to look at life from the perspective of a character in a game - particularly if they aren't the player character but someone incidental - and their relationship with the game controller so that might be an angle they will take here.
I can see this possibly working as some kind of quirky comedy (or perhaps, given the irresistable urge this game seems to spark at one point or another to "torture" your characters by putting them in rooms without toilets or doors and getting a little Gitmo (Guantanamo) on their arses it could be a horror film)
Or apparently you could just drop a whole bunch of satellites on the characters all at once. (You really can find everything on YouTube)
